Seawolf II was designed from the ground up to be lightweight, simple to operate, reliable, and cost effective. The vehicle contains a number of features conceived and developed for military applications by Vortex HC including a triangular chassis, rotating thrusters, and NACA-inspired flow hulls. This design gave the vehicle superior stability and maneuverability in the water.

Design on Seawolf II began in October 2005. A number of lessons were learned from the successes and failures of Seawolf I, and as a result, Seawolf II featured numerous improvements including simpler control, seperate power and electronics tubes, a Windows operating system, and streamlined acoustic navigation. Many students worked on various aspects of Seawolf II for their senior design projects.

Seawolf II used two separate watertight chambers to hold all of its electronics (forward-looking chamber) and batteries (internal chamber, under the hull). The vehicle also used rotating thrusters to achieve 5 Degrees of Freedom. In the Spring semester of 2006, four senior design teams worked on various parts of the vehicle. One team was responsible for the power problems (designing battery monitoring circuits, selecting DC/DC's and building a wiring harness). Another team was responsible for acoustic navigation (one of the requirements for the competition). The remaining teams were responsible for the design of a data acquisition for the main computer and image processing tasks (another requirement for the competition).

Initial solidworks design:

Chassis assembled with battery tube and front tube:

To learn more about the design and construction of Seawolf II, check out our 2006 AUVSI technical paper.

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