8th Annual AUV Competition Results

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."

Best new entry was awarded to Georgia Tech

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

[SuperBanana]

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

Re:is this the same competition

[warbital]

Unfortunately it's not the same one. I was on the only High School team in this competition and while we would have liked to beat MIT the best we could ever do was get second place (with MIT in first of course).

Re:is this the same competition

[briankoenig]

Yes, Amador Valley is where I went to highschool, and my Junior year the UAV team beat all the other competitors, including MIT. This year they placed 5th, still very respectable for a high school with an (assumably) much smaller budget than these colleges. Not absolutely positive, but the year that Amador won, the budget was $3k. Funny thing is that although the UAV competition is prestigious, even when we won 1st almost nobody outside of the sciences on campus noticed.

Re:XP Embedded

[a16]

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].

Re:Cornell Sub

[badgerz]

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.

École de technologie supérieure 2nd :)

[Seidoger]

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!

Re:is this the same competition

[wgray8231]

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.04/robot.htm l?pg=1&topic=robot&topic_set= [wired.com]

You might be thinking of this article. I'm just glad UF could follow in the high schoolers' footsteps.

My thoughts (On Amador Team)

[Hex4def6]

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 1-4 where the only teams able to complete part of the mission (I don't believe anyone was able to complete the entire mission).

I think as regards problems... I know for us it was our PC104 stack getting destroyed by some short in the endcap... For Univ of Victoria, they had communication troubles between their custom PIC boards, and didn't have the original guy on their team who made them anymore (apparently he dumped the team 2 days before the competition, and didn't return their emails). For Rhode Island, I know that their bouyancy system, which is kinda neat actually (they use a compression cylinder to change their bouyancy) somehow leaked, and flouded their tube. For the rest of the teams, I'm not so sure, but they were similar problems. I think everyone suffers from reliability issues, not technical sophistication problems -- everyone has these amazing technologies that are all very impressive. The problem comes with the intergration of all these components into one vehicle.

Re:Cornell Sub

[Hex4def6]

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...

Re:Not the same competition?

[Hex4def6]

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. :)