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."

XP Embedded

[malelder]

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.

Debain powered contestant

[demachina]

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.

Scoring?

[jgbishop]

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...

Re:XP Embedded

[NatteringNabob]

>>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 do.

MIT team

[Jay7525]

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 weight UF and ETS finished first and second with us third. But besides the bitching, UF did have a badass little sub and we look forward to next years competition. As far as the uniforms, they are supposed to be funny and have been around since the first mit team 8 years ago.

Re:Debain powered contestant

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm from the Georgia Tech team, and we indeed ran bare bones Linux, which worked great. Despite a 266MHz processor with 128MB ram, our computer booted in just over two minutes.

Other teams, even with *much* nicer computers, often had boot times of five minutes or more and less stability. I was shocked at how many teams needed to reboot on the dock, wasting precious time.

As for the low overall standing, the competition is truly a veteran's game. Our choice of OS and language (C as opposed to Matlab) helped us rise above the other three newcomers (who brought up the very rear of the standings), as opposed to obstructing a top finish.