CougarTail & CUB: A General-Purpose Mast and Central Utility Board for Cylindrical Underwater Enclosures

RESUMO

Cylindrical watertight enclosures are widely used across various underwater systems, from unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs), to remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), to various sensor platforms. However, electronics are typically built on rectangular PCBs arranged in horizontal stacks, which inefficiently occupy the circular cross-section volume that is critical for both payload capacity and buoyancy management. This paper presents CUB (Central Utility Board) and CougarTail, a general-purpose system designed to address this gap. CUB is a circular PCB sized for 4-inch-diameter enclosures that consolidates a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 (CM5) and an STM32 microcontroller, while also providing power management features and auxiliary connections. Mounted coaxially, CUB reduces the electronics stack of our CougUV from 200 mm of tube length and 709 g to 25 mm and 156 g, returning that length and mass budget to payload and buoyancy trim. CougarTail is an open-source companion sensor mast that houses a GPS antenna and two dual-band (2.4 and 5 GHz) omnidirectional PCB antennas. Both components are validated through bench testing and integration on a CougUV platform, our small open-sourced torpedo UUVs.