While the Blacktip drone is being developed as our primary research platform, so far most of the research it has been driving involves developing the techniques used in its own construction. Eventually however both the hardware and software for the Blacktip drones will be completed. In panning for that time a number of sensor stubs were added to the hull design. The stubs are places were custom sensors can be added to upgrade the drone later on. Basically the stubs are weighted physical placeholders for future work.
Nose Sensor
The ability to house water property sensors in the nose allows sampling of pristine data about the water column the drone is traveling through. Data can be gather where there is minimal change driven by the hulls having churned up the water.
The nose sensor stub’s odd, deep back shape, is becuase it is sized to be able to house a raspberry pi zero, and with it a front facing camera module.
Given shark anatomy this technically should be called the “snout sensor”, but we all though that just seems to imply a sensor for detecting snouts, and for some reason nose sensor didn’t. English is a weird language.
Belly Sensor
The belly has two sensor stubs in it. The forward one, while able to be repurposed later, was scaled to allow adding the BlueRobotics ping depth sensor. The aft stub was sized for use in a long term project adding a custom down looking camera and photo-spectrometer to Blacktip.
Cheek Sensors
Two cheek sensor stubs were added, and sized and placed, in order to be able to add stereo hydrophones to the hull. Placed on opposite sides of the hull as they are, should enable simple quadrant triangulation of acoustic sources.
Pectoral Fin Sensors
While not a physical stub, the fins and tail all bolt onto the hull. This enabled designing a version of the pectoral fins with a tip in their chamber where sensors or actuators can be added later.
A cable run in the hull mates with one in the base of the pectoral fin. The cable channel can be seen in the cutaway of the fin in the figure above. Just as caps cover the bolt recesses in the find, a separate cap covers the chamber in deployment.
