Ivan Diaz

Mechatronics engineer with a strong interest on robotics and machine learning. @Tec de Monterrey and @HTW Saar

Introduction

VantTec’s UUV is a project at Tecnológico de Monterrey. After a long stay in Germany, I came back to Mexico and took over the UUV, which faced significant challenges, including my lack of familiarity with underwater robotics. After a year of team effort of more than 15 undergraduate students, the UUV became a reality and is ready to continue the legacy of previous generations. This are the first results entirely done by my administration:

Localization

The UUV aims to contain th next localization scheme. image-center

At the moment the UUV contains only an IMU, a hydrophone and a ZED2i, i.e., an incomplete localization scheme. Therefore, the decision to develop algorithms with a stronger emphasis on the camera were being reviewed, e.g., NeRF-SLAM, 3d Gaussian Splats, color enhancement for underwater applications.

Working on:

  • Underwater backscatter removal and color enhancing and reviewing for real-time methods.
  • Optical flow for obtaining linear velocities aimed for underwater SLAM.

Vision

At the moment, we are working with synthetic data, i.e., rendered images with annotations, to feed object detection models. This is done using a pipeline with diffusion models. Given that we want the image to be already annotated, we are using ControlNet neural network architecture. The result is shown next.

image-center

Working on:

  • Targeted for IROS2025: synthetic data generation for underwater applications. A novel approach introducing actual physical coefficients to condition diffusion models.

Software

The UUV aplication works with ROS. Many students generations have passed by and the repo is broken with different python and ROS versions. In addition, the Gazebo simulation is outdated and is missing key sensors necesarry for the UUV, such as the sonar.

Working on:

  • Repo cleaning, reducing branches, solving issues and moving the whole application to ROS2.
  • Updating gazebo simulation for a more realistic underwater application, including sensors such as sonar and other hydrostatic plugins used by the control schemes.

Public repository in github: Vanttec UUV