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8th Annual AUV Competition Results

Posted by timothy on Wed Aug 10, 2005 12:13 PM
from the blub-blub-blub-whirrrrrrr dept.
Robotics Education Science
An anonymous reader writes "This weekend the 8th Annual Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) Competition was held in San Diego. This year teams were challenged to complete three tasks including finding a docking station, inspecting a pipeline, and surfacing in a recovery zone marked by an acoustic pinger. Teams from MIT, Cornell, Duke and sixteen others competed for the grand prize. After an intense final round, the University of Florida's Team SubjuGator dethroned MIT and walked away with the victory. Interestingly, the UF team ran Windows XP on their embedded computer."
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  • In last place (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    And in last place, it's the British Autosub Project [hero.ac.uk], last seen early 2005 somewhere under the the Fimbul Ice Shelf.

  • XP Embedded (Score:5, Interesting)

    by malelder (414533) <(kurtchrist) (at) (gmail.com)> on Wednesday August 10 2005, @12:17PM (#13287290)
    The embedded version of XP is actually quite nice. I helped configure a version that runs some navigation equipment on airplanes. Having main-stream support for the hardware, and then ONLY having to put in that specific support, plus the support for the basic applications it will use keeps it quite stable. It's also really small when done correctly...we run ours off of a 32meg thumbdrive.
    • Obviously XP has better hardware support. I just look for the submarine with the Windows logo on it at Best Buy.

    • Re:XP Embedded (Score:5, Informative)

      by a16 (783096) on Wednesday August 10 2005, @12:45PM (#13287538)
      Worth noting that in this case it appears they are not running XP Embedded, they are instead just running a standard version of XP Pro on a Pentium M board, according to this page [spacing-guild.net].
    • "This is the captain speaking..."

      "What are your coordinates?"

      "0x0000007B (0xF741B84C,0xC0000034,0x00000000,0x00000000) INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE"
    • The embedded version of XP is actually quite nice. I helped configure a version that runs some navigation equipment on airplanes.

      They use XP for navigating on airplanes now? Wow - finally it gives real meaning to the term "Blue screen of death". Maybe this article belongs in the "whirrrrrrr-blub-blub-blub dept." instead. Given the (in)stability of my current XP boxen, I think I'll walk everywhere from now on...
    • >>It's also really small when done correctly...we run ours off of a 32meg thumbdrive. This isn't especially small in the embedded space. I used uCLinux on a Motorola Dragnoball a few years ago, and the entire system ran quite well on a uCSimm with 8 MB of dynamic memory and 8MB of flash including ethernet and tcp/ip. Things like QNX and Windriver can be tailored to run in even less space. Of course, it depends on the hardware architecture you are running on, and especially on what you are trying to d
  • "Interestingly, the UF team ran Windows XP on their embedded computer" -- Ow, Snap!

    • Re:Windows XP (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      What, no linux? How did this get through? Again, a proof that the editors don't read the full submissions before approving them.

  • When something goes wrong (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 10 2005, @12:21PM (#13287331)
    Does it show the Blue Screen of Depth?

  • Debain powered contestant (Score:5, Interesting)

    by demachina (71715) on Wednesday August 10 2005, @12:26PM (#13287371)
    There is a whitepaper [linuxdevices.com] on Linux Devices on Georgia Tech's Debian Sarge powered Mongoose. It didn't fare well overall but it was their first year there and won best newcomer.

  • is this the same competition (Score:4, Funny)

    by ccordero (22284) on Wednesday August 10 2005, @12:29PM (#13287402)
    where MIT lost against high school students>?
  • Deep Blue Sea of Death

  • Best new entry was awarded to Georgia Tech (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 10 2005, @12:36PM (#13287459)
    It is worth mentioning that Georgia Tech (which got 12th place overall) was awarded Best New Entry. Their vehicle was built on an $8000 budget, held together with *duck tape*, shrouded their thrusters with buckets they bought at home depot during the competition, and still managed to beat teams with vehicles costing $60,000! (just look at the competitors' webpages) Quite an impressive feat to build a vehicle that competative on such a shoe string budget, on their first entry into this competition no less!

  • What's with thhe jumpsuits? (Score:3, Informative)

    by SuperBanana (662181) on Wednesday August 10 2005, @12:37PM (#13287476)

    Perhaps MIT would have faired better if they hadn't spent time and money on making uniforms with NASA/boyscout-style patches [mit.edu].

  • not sure which would be the correct term since this is a submersible vehicle after all. In any case, what is the MTBF on a running system? What happens when a hardware component fails or fails to respond?

    It would be interesting to see details such as these.

    We take for granted that when devices are powered by Linux that it behaves well. We take for granted that Windows does not. It's a bit unfair to keep assuming Windows will cause failures in any system but it was a reputation that was undeniably earned
    • The idea of rebooting as a solution essentially started with Windows as far as I can see.

      Did you miss the period of home computing where rebooting was required to exit applications? Before multitasking etc, it used to be the only way.

      Somehow, thanks to Microsoft (IMHO) CTRL-ALT-DELETE is thought of as a means of fixing a problem.

      Actually, it came about because what I describe. It used to be a big secret until helpdesks started using it in their telephone-scripts [e.g. 1) insert floppy, 2) ctrl-alt-

        • THANK YOU!

          I saw that once long ago and haven't seen it since. I wanted to find it and save it for posterity and couldn't find it again. Now I have it. And thanks to Linux+mplayer+firefox+plugin, I was able to save the file to disk as well.

  • Scoring? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by jgbishop (861610)
    How does one find out what the various teams did wrong to see why they placed where they did? It would be interesting to see where the various schools made mistakes, but I don't see any such information on the website. My alma mater (NCSU) finished poorly in 18th place! At least we weren't last...
    • I agree, and what I found was simply by talking to the teams.. I really think AUVAI should have an "after the fact" type page, with comments by different teams as to why they did so well / bad.

      You can read on the AUVAI webpage the breakdown of points... if one copmletes the mission, all the others are basically irrelevants (such as static judging). However, since so many people were not able to complete the mission, these points become important for seperating out the bottom of the stack. Basically, teams 1
  • Hehehe! Being from ETS (and in an engineering team myself, our school's solar car team), had to bring this up, ETS too unclassed MIT :) (by finishing 2nd)

    Go S.O.N.I.A. [etsmtl.ca]! Good job guys!
  • MS is definitely increasing their influence in academia through large scale donations. I don't know if that was the reason that Flordia went with Windows, but I have seen it elsewhere. When I ran a school engineering project, we received a computer from Intel. I then received a letter in the mail from Microsoft requesting that a sponsorship sticker be placed on our vehicle. Seeing as how the first thing I did was wipe Windows off that donated machine, I declined.
  • As I heard it from one of the competitors, the water was all murky and none of the teams' algorithms worked.

    Time to preorder water samples for next year.

    Go Felix!

  • MIT team (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Jay7525 (906659)
    I might as well give you our side. I am on the MIT team and we didnt start really gearing up for the competition until about a month before it started. There are only 2 returning members from the previous year and there were 4 of us (including myself) that were on the team for less than a month before the competition. So we did not exactly prepare well, and we ended up setting our dead reckoning angle incorrectly in the final which caused us to miss tasks we had working in the practice runs. So based on
  • Once again, Stevens Institute of Technology is nowhere to be seen. Previously, the school ranked:

    1998 - 2nd
    1999 - Honorable Mention
    2000 - 8th
    2001 - 12th

    Notice a trend? It's a symptom of an underlying problem [unevenstevens.com] @ what used to be one of the best tech schools in the nation.
  • I've gotta put in the obligatory "Go Duke!" Also, I happen to know/work with one of the guys on the team by the name of John Felkins. John, if you happen to see this, congrats!
    • Nah, you could only get to 70 MPH for the first couple weeks. Being a Windows machine, it would start getting slower and slower... and slower over time. Eventually, the NY Times would run a story suggesting that throwing out your year old car and buying a new one (also running Windows, of course) makes good financial sense compared to the constant repair costs.

    • Re:Cornell Sub (Score:5, Informative)

      by badgerz (90254) on Wednesday August 10 2005, @12:55PM (#13287620) Homepage
      i dont know who the original poster is, but i was actually on the CUAUV team, and was actually at this competition. UF absolutely deserved their victory, their submarine performed phenomenally well, and was incredibly light and tiny. a job extremely well done by them. as for sour grapes, none of us on the team have absolutely any hard feelings. we're in this for the fun, for the engineering, and to advance the state of the art. not to buffer our egos.

      • Re:Cornell Sub (Score:4, Informative)

        by Hex4def6 (538820) on Wednesday August 10 2005, @01:54PM (#13288109)
        I agree -- we were next to them in the tents (Amador), and I can tell you that I don't think I ever saw them open the tube of their sub, which means that they basically had all the hardware sorted before coming to the competition, and only had to focus on a few software bugs. I was impressed with their team. Of course, they did have a PHD student, and all the others seemed to already have bachelors / masters degrees, but still...
      • It was you who altered the thrust mechanism!
    • Or drug and weapons smugglers

      Drug smugglers don't need things like subs. The illegal drugs trade is the third biggest industry on the planet. That is, there are more drugs entering your country each week than many other consumables e.g. livestock, clothing. They aren't getting smuggled in under toupees or in people stomachs to satify those volumes. Just need to know a "supportive" customs official or intelligence agent, who will allow the cargo through unchecked. Makes a lot of money and helps you fund t

      • I heard of cases where the drugs are smuggled onto cargo ships with submarines. Those people have money.

        If only drugs were legalized, this whole multi-billion industry could be kept out of the hands of criminals. The governments have double losses, all because they have the illusion they can control everything and everyone.
        • If only drugs were legalized, this whole multi-billion industry could be kept out of the hands of criminals.

          Preaching to the choir there, however what does worry me somewhat is what will the traditional supply routes turn to? The markup is due to the risk, so if there was zero risk the commercial carriers would take over and the illegitimate supply lines would run dry. Coming from a country with hardly any firearms and one of the highest illicit drug consumers around, it's kinda obvious where some of the

      • I think you're thinking of the feel-good article in wired a few months back about the broke highschool team that beat MIT.. This is a different competition, although I think by the same organizers. The Wired article covered a ROV style competition, while this one is autonomous only... significantly harder. :)
    • Good job swimming with the big fish. Your website was very informative too.

      You should post some actions shots of the team and the murky environment. Update your resumes too.

      It's always refreshing to see young kids compete and do well against well-funded colleges.

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