ArduinoSub —A Low-Cost ROV Kit for Ocean Engineering Education

This paper presents the development of ArduinoSub, a low-cost Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) kit to improve marine technical education and in this way help to prepare future workforce for ocean occupations. ArduinoSub is an educational robot kit for middle school to high school students, even college students to build a ROV in an in-school or out-of-school setting. Students build the ROV from a kit comprised of low-cost, easily accessible parts, following a curriculum that teaches basic engineering and science concepts with an ocean engineering theme. By using as many commercial off-the-shelf parts as possible, we are able to keep the total cost of the ArduinoSub ROV to be under $1000. Several in water tests successfully demonstrated the ArduinoSub ROV's go to waypoint, path following, depth holding, and video recording capability.