Congrats on Team Bumblebee's 1st Place in the 2018 RobotX Maritime Challenge - DFRobot Sponsorship Project

We are pleased to know Bumblebee, a robotic research team that we DFRobot sponsored, have clinched 1st Placing - Overall Champions out of 14 other teams from the US, Asia and Australia in the RobotX Maritime Challenge held in Hawaii in December 2018!

Team Bumblebee is a fully undergraduate team from the National University of Singapore, with students from different disciplines such as Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering as well as Mechanical Engineering. They are currently working on two main systems, the Autonomous Surface Vessel (ASV) and the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV), and participate in two major competitions, the annual RoboSub Competition and the biennial RobotX Maritime Challenge. The team managed to clinch the Champion title in RobotX 2018, where they competed with their combined ASV-AUV system. The team managed to successfully deploy their AUV using Launch and Recovery System into the choppy waters of the competition site, which is just off the coast of Sand Island, Honolulu. 

During the competition, Team Bumblebee is split into 3 main sub teams, Electrical, Mechanical and Software. The Electrical subteam is responsible for providing their systems with a robust and reliable electrical backbone, to ensure optimal operation of systems. During the system development, 3 phases were implemented, namely the Design phase, the Fabrication phase, and the Testing phase.

In the design phase, we can see their efforts on online research, and search through internal resources to generate new ideas, and improve existing methods to satisfy the system requirements. Later on they managed to tranfer those ideas through prototyping components on breadboards and prototype boards if possible, and sometimes even design PCBs for this prototyping phase. Only after proving that the components are suitable for the usage, they design the desired PCB to integrate the components into new or existing systems. This PCB is designed with reliability and robustness in mind, and quality PCB fabrication is needed to ensure that.

Subsequently, Team Bumblebee have done rigorous testings on the fabricated PCBs to ensure that they can sustain long operations and numerous uses. This whole development cycle allows them to develop reliable and robust electrical backbone for our autonomous systems.

We are very glad to offer continuous support in sponsoring Team Bumblebee with high quality PCB fabrications, that also have a quick turnaround time, allowing them to shorten the overall time for development. These PCBs are also quality verified for sustain long usage, which have uptime in the range of hundreds of hours in ASV and AUV system.

We affirm Team Bumblebee won't accomplish it without maintaining an enthusiastic attitude on robotics and always keeping an advanced level over the past years. Wish them good luck on upcoming robot challenges.