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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."
Maybe a little more info.
Lasers don't work that well underwater because water distorts light and various wavelengths. The deeper you go for instance, the less natural light would be recieved (less light = more noise).
Plus, most supermarket scanners use a red laser to scan barcodes, and red is one of first wavelengths to fade as you go deeper. Kodak even sells special underwater film that is extra sensitive to red wavelengths so you can take more natural looking pictures further down.
My guess is they are using webcams because the refractive qualities of water makes using lasers more difficult than getting a webcam and some image processing software.