Robot subs compete
posted Aug 6th 2009 1:08pm by Caleb Kraftfiled under: robots hacks
These Autonomous Underwater Vehicles are all competing in the 12th annual AUVSI competition. They have to complete an underwater obstacle course that involves some tight maneuvering, retrieval of a briefcase, dropping bombs, and firing torpedoes. We’ve seen several UAVs before, but we haven’t ever seen them weaponized and in action. Yeah, those weapons don’t look lethal, but isn’t that just a matter of ammunition?
I actually went down there on the last day of competition (here in SD). It happened at a Marine underwater-acoustics facility, which was pretty nifty, but the real stars of the show were the bots.
Cornell’s bot was an impressive beast, fit for underwater research to be certain — it was also freaking huge, in person, compared to most of the other bots. U of Maryland (iirc) had an impressive entry, and they were the last team to compete (being last year’s winners), but according to a member of the team they had a mis-detect of some variety, resulting in an incredibly off trajectory — when the bot corrected, it ran into the wall of the pool and just tried to keep pushing forward. Their mics couldn’t detect the beacon for the final goal (the “briefcase” that they had to recover), so it didn’t know how to course correct. It was sad, just watching it sit in one place.
What I found the worst, though, was the “San Diego iBotics” (mostly UCSD students) team’s entry’s story — apparently they were sitting pretty, had a couple good partial test runs, and while they were tweaking settings and testing their system, they had a component failure (fancy compasses apparently !like heat, and they were running it for a long time out of water — aka, uncooled). That went belly-up, and their bot ended up going in circles. It was an impressive entry, anyway — nice carbon-fiber manta-ray design and everything. I was sad I didn’t get to see it compete.
Oh well, maybe next year.