Role: Software IC, Controls Engineer, OS Comms Focus
HornetX was designed as a fully modular AUV for SAUVC 2025, with a strong emphasis on software reliability and maintainability. The Jetson Orin NX runs ROS2 Humble and hosts all perception, planning, and mission logic, while the control stack implements closed-loop PID control across all six degrees of freedom. Depth, heading, and position controllers were tuned to account for buoyancy offsets and asymmetric drag, which are dominant disturbances in low-speed underwater manoeuvres.
A key focus of my role was operating system and inter-process communication reliability. The autonomy stack was decomposed into independent ROS2 nodes with clear message contracts, allowing individual subsystems to be restarted without collapsing the entire vehicle software. This significantly improved debugging efficiency during pool testing and reduced recovery time after sensor or driver faults.
The vehicle uses IMU and depth sensing for state estimation. Because these sensors alone drift over time, control laws were tuned to be robust to slowly varying bias rather than assuming perfect state knowledge. This resulted in stable hover and repeatable heading control even under sensor noise and minor buoyancy changes caused by battery discharge.