🌊 CoUGARs Wiki

CoUGARs is a low-cost, configurable AUV platform designed for multi-agent autonomy research by the Field Robotic Systems Lab (FROST Lab) at Brigham Young University.

🛠️ Fleet Assembly

• Bill of Materials
• Assembly Instructions
• Base Station Software Setup
• CougUV Software Setup

🤿 Field Operations

• Mission Preparation
• Fleet Deployment
• Post-Mission Analysis

🛟 Resources

• Helpful Tutorials
• Sensor Datasheets

🤝 Contributing

• Create a Branch: Create a new branch using the format name/feature (e.g., nelson/repo-docs).

• Make Changes: Develop and debug your new feature. Add good documentation.

  If you need to add dependencies, update the package.xml, Dockerfile, cougars.repos, or dependencies.repos in your branch and test building the image locally. The CI will automatically build and push the new image to Docker Hub upon merge.

• Sync Frequently: Regularly rebase your branch against main (or merge main into your branch) to prevent conflicts.

• Submit a PR: Open a pull request, ensure required tests pass, and merge once approved.

📚 Citations

Please cite our relevant publications if you find this repository useful for your research:

CoUGARs

@misc{durrant2025lowcostmultiagentfleetacoustic,
  title={Low-cost Multi-agent Fleet for Acoustic Cooperative Localization Research},
  author={Nelson Durrant and Braden Meyers and Matthew McMurray and Clayton Smith and Brighton Anderson and Tristan Hodgins and Kalliyan Velasco and Joshua G. Mangelson},
  year={2025},
  eprint={2511.08822},
  archivePrefix={arXiv},
  primaryClass={cs.RO},
  url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.08822},
}

HoloOcean-ROS

@misc{meyers2025testingevaluationunderwatervehicle,
  title={Testing and Evaluation of Underwater Vehicle Using Hardware-In-The-Loop Simulation with HoloOcean},
  author={Braden Meyers and Joshua G. Mangelson},
  year={2025},
  eprint={2511.07687},
  archivePrefix={arXiv},
  primaryClass={cs.RO},
  url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.07687},
}

HoloOcean

@inproceedings{potokar2022holooceanunderwaterroboticssim,
  author={Easton Potokar and Spencer Ashford and Michael Kaess and Joshua G. Mangelson},
  title={Holo{O}cean: An Underwater Robotics Simulator},
  booktitle={Proc. IEEE Intl. Conf. on Robotics and Automation, ICRA},
  address={Philadelphia, PA, USA},
  month={May},
  year={2022}
}