Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition

krugg234 writes "Today [ed. note: well, a few days ago] marks the start of the Fifth Annual International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition. This year's competition involves completely autonomous robots locating and reading bar codes at various depths underwater at a naval base in San Diego. There are some good links on the site to individual competitors' websites to see how different schools tackled the same problem."

Comments

Reading bar codes under water?

[ambisinistral]

The Navy must be planning on setting up underwater grocery stores for dolphins. Well, they'll have the market cornered...

OMG, the Navy team uses Windows 98

[Styx]

The US Naval Academy is participating in this contest. Their vehicle is powered by ... a pc104 running Windows 98...

Some people might say that the navy hasn't learned anything from the past...

:-)

So now we know

[panurge]

That's how you recognise a hostile nuclear sub: read the barcode. Presumably IFF doesn't work under water so our hunter-killers have to rely on correct labeling. And now we know why so many spies were needed in the Cold War: they were trying to get the codes for the entire Nato and Soviet fleets.

Scan the bar code, launch the torpedo: the message comes back over the VLF "You have destroyed a Russian cruiser. That is a total of 550 points on your reward card. Do you want to choose a gift now?"

Extreme cynicism aside, however, this kind of competition is surely a Good Thing, and I wiash it had been around when I was a student.

Stands to reason

[Subcarrier]

The US Naval Academy is participating in this contest. Their vehicle is powered by a pc104 running Windows 98

Somebody must have told them that Windows 98 goes down faster than anything else on the market.

Experienced Driver

[Tablizer]

I assume Ted Kennedy will be in the race.