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...

:-)

Word

[papasui]

Now I can have a fly ride to pick up some fish-tail mermaid honeys, we can cruise on over to my fish crib and just bounce.

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.

Why don't they make it interesting

[Atonomous Coward]

To spice things up, why not allow the teams to equip their subs with short-range torpedoes? This would be fun to bet on. Also, it would serve as a more practical simulation of where modern warfare is headed. This would be even more badass if they used instead.

Re:Why don't they make it interesting

[tramm]

Atonomous Coward wrote:

why not allow the teams to equip their subs with short-range torpedoes? [...] This would be even more badass if they used this instead

It would be more like BattleBots, but tell you what -- build your own autonomous helicopter and then see if you want to risk losing so much effort in a midair collision. I wouldn't want to lose my helicopter and sensors in such a display of pyrotechnics.

But, if I had a sponsor, I might reconsider...

Re:Why don't they make it interesting

[glwtta]

better yet, they need freaking lasers attached to their heads

Re:Come on, admit it

[scott1853]

Duh, it's what you call an AC when they're posting from their car while driving down the I70.

laser bar code readers?

[eracerblue]

most of the teams that are actually recording bar codes are just using a simple webcam in waterproof enclosure. the on-board computer then performs some processor intenstive code to recognize bar codes in all sorts of conditions (orientation, etc).

what i'm curious about is why no-one went with a bar code reading system similar to that in use in a grocery store? certainly the hardware modifications are possible to make a cheapo and less processor intensive solution like that work underwater.

thoughts??

Re:laser bar code readers?

[barista]

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.

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.

Re:laser bar code readers? I'm confused

[Uberminky]

I'm confused. I won't pretend to be an expert on any of this, but your comment doesn't seem right to me at all. Correct me where I'm wrong, etc, but here's my take. They're probably using the camera, because they need to visually find the barcode to begin with. Barcode scanners are excellent for reading a code that's positioned in front of the reader, but once you've gone through the trouble of locating the code with your camera, you might as well just finish the job and read the code.

Now about the light issues. This doesn't seem right at all. Light doesn't bend more underwater than in air -- it bends at the transition between different optical densities. Since there would be no transitions underwater, the light wouldn't bend.

The deeper you go for instance, the less natural light would be recieved (less light = more noise).

Isn't the whole point of using a laser, to eliminate the need for (or interference from) other sources of light? It is very easy to detect a specific frequency of light as it contrasts to black, so I highly doubt barcode scanners care at all about ambient light. I haven't tried it, but it would surprise me a lot to find that barcode scanners don't work in the dark, for instance.

red is one of first wavelengths to fade as you go deeper

Again... the light coming from the sky fades at that depth, but I submit that such light would make no difference.

For all I know you invented the bloody barcode scanner, so maybe I'm talking out of my butt. But then, maybe you are. ;) These are my reasoned opinions, and if you have more details to back yourself up I'm very interested in hearing them. :)

Experienced Driver

[Tablizer]

I assume Ted Kennedy will be in the race.

At future competition ...

[Taco Cowboy]

... I hope that the autonomous unwater bots will capture some fish and then barcode them.

Re:Next year...

[ceejayoz]

Your sharks are endangered... you'll have to use the mutated sea bass instead.

Stevens Institute of Technology

[Lord Omlette]

1998 - 2nd
1999 - Honorable Mention
2000 - 8th
2001 - They sent a fucking CS student to do what an EE and an ME student were supposed to do, the dumb fuck didn't even pressurize the fucking sub, so when he put it in the water it went *blubblubblub* to the bottom of water.
2002 - We're not even listed.

I'm glad that the navy is using Win98 so that we can make fun of them, but goddammit, I'm still crying at our school's inability to comprehend that the students might honestly be more interested in working on something cool than something profitable.

WinNT did not halt ship

[AHumbleOpinion]

The article you cite was, according to it's own publisher who later backed away from it, early speculation. Reality did not match the speculation. According to people actually on the ship and who actually worked on the software:

http://www.sciam.com/1998/1198issue/1198techbus2.h tml

Others insist that NT was not the culprit. According to Lieutenant
Commander Roderick Fraser, who was the chief engineer on board the
ship at the time of the incident, the fault was with certain
applications that were developed by CAE Electronics in Leesburg, Va.
As Harvey McKelvey, former director of navy programs for CAE, admits,
"If you want to put a stick in anybody's eye, it should be in ours."
But McKelvey adds that the crash would not have happened if the navy
had been using a production version of the CAE software, which he
asserts has safeguards to prevent the type of failure that occurred.

The programs that crashed were LAN terminals, not the LAN itself. A server app corrupted it's own database and client apps naively tried to use the bad data. At least in the debug version of the apps. These app controlled this ships equipment. The OS wasn't involved and it would have mattered what OS was being used.

medellin.org is one of the sponsors....

[billstewart]

What, a convenient delivery vehicle to haul a few kilos or a few tons of material somewhere without needing a driver? Who'd want that?