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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."
And in last place, it's the British Autosub Project, last seen early 2005 somewhere under the the Fimbul Ice Shelf.
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.
Yuma, AZ...You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.
"Interestingly, the UF team ran Windows XP on their embedded computer" -- Ow, Snap!
I go to Cornell and can tell you EXACTLY why Florida won. A recent-graduate engineer that had worked on this project completely changed the thrust mechanism and it was never the same. CUAV was on track for victory.
Does it show the Blue Screen of Depth?
Should it be deep blue screen of death, then?
or if TJ keeps 'accidentally' dumping their sewage into our ocean, brown s.o.d.
yuck.
I just hope MIT takes all their cars and puts them on top of their dorms.
"Kent, you know you're not supposed to park that thing on campus, right?"
** "It's not my job to stand between the people talking to me, and the ones listening to me." -- Pego the Jerk
I just got a call from 1995, they want their jokes back
& I wish I knew the password to your heart . . . &
Nah, you could only get to 70 MPH for the first couple weeks. Being a Windows machine, it would start getting slower and slower... and slower over time. Eventually, the NY Times would run a story suggesting that throwing out your year old car and buying a new one (also running Windows, of course) makes good financial sense compared to the constant repair costs.
There is a whitepaper 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.
@de_machina
Interestingly, the UF team ran Windows XP on their embedded computer.
'course it was! What other OS would win an AUV competition? After all, XP is just NT redone, and as we all know, NT sinks ships...
where MIT lost against high school students>?
Yea, enough with the lame Blue Screen Of Death jokes already. Unless you have been hiding under a rock, you should know that Vista is going to change all of that. Now there is the Red Screen of Death as well.
Our group was using Windows XP on an embedded system for mobile robots when we started out. We ran into a number of problems e.g. locking up so I won't recommed it for any critical or serious application. We are using real-time Linux now which can be considered stable and is a pleasure to work with.
I heard about a team of Hispanics from a public high school in Phoenix,AZ winning a similar competition in recent years, beating MIT and others.
Appearantly this is not the same one.
Deep Blue Sea of Death
Great grandparent referenced the RSOD, you insensitive clod!
Guess they don't teach humility at Cornell?
It is worth mentioning that Georgia Tech (which got 12th place overall) was awarded Best New Entry. Their vehicle was built on an $8000 budget, held together with *duck tape*, shrouded their thrusters with buckets they bought at home depot during the competition, and still managed to beat teams with vehicles costing $60,000! (just look at the competitors' webpages) Quite an impressive feat to build a vehicle that competative on such a shoe string budget, on their first entry into this competition no less!
Perhaps MIT would have faired better if they hadn't spent time and money on making uniforms with NASA/boyscout-style patches.
Please help metamoderate.
Second, the "199x called" jokes are just as redundant as anything else.
not sure which would be the correct term since this is a submersible vehicle after all. In any case, what is the MTBF on a running system? What happens when a hardware component fails or fails to respond?
It would be interesting to see details such as these.
We take for granted that when devices are powered by Linux that it behaves well. We take for granted that Windows does not. It's a bit unfair to keep assuming Windows will cause failures in any system but it was a reputation that was undeniably earned.
The idea of rebooting as a solution essentially started with Windows as far as I can see. A computer runs by performing a series of instructions. If, after running a series long enough that the program code or the data it acts on becomes corrupt or unusable (ruling out hardware failure of course) then there is a problem with the code that should be FIXED. Rebooting is only a measure to be taken when debugging a system, not repairing it. Somehow, thanks to Microsoft (IMHO) CTRL-ALT-DELETE is thought of as a means of fixing a problem. I come from a different world where rebooting means you just installed a new kernel and want to run it.
Or drug and weapons smugglers. If you detect nearby vehicles drop to the bottom and power down into stealth mode, wake up maybe many weeks later and continue onto a remote beach location for the pickup. Even with advanced submarine signal processing these are very very hard to find and you can't put submarine nets around a whole continent.
Autonomous vehicles of any kind, sea, air or land are a technological mixed blessing with massive potential for bad use. Not that we should stop research and development, but just be aware of what happens once cheap robots are let loose into the wild. Imagine the madness of a hijacked aerial predator drone run amok over a major city.
No, wait, the other thing: tedious.
I'm an old unix geek, and I gotta say that the young unix geeks are complete whiners who barely know how to script, let alone CODE.
Advise? stop complaining about windows and write some friggin CODE!
I lost $1000 betting on the Duke team. I can't believe that they suck so much.
Good to see Amador Valey HS was there again this year.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
A 32M thumb drive is small? I'm sorry, but in my book you don't get to play the small card until you are at least under the old DOS real-mode 640K limit.
Congrats guys, you outclassed the MIT and well, you truly deserve to be there. Considering that the team is not as well funded than the MITs, it's quite an achievement.
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...
Go, and never darken my towels again! -- Rufus
Hehehe! Being from ETS (and in an engineering team myself, our school's solar car team), had to bring this up, ETS too unclassed MIT :) (by finishing 2nd)
Go S.O.N.I.A.! Good job guys!
Okay Mods, Can we please start modding each and every one of these groaningly unamusing blue screen of death jokes redundant and unfunny?
Web Developers: Celebrate to our roots! Animated Gifs and Tiled Backgrounds, dont let our history die!
Choosy Russian submariners choose XP!
"It appears you're designing an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle. Would you like me to:
A. Lose control of the rudder and drive in circles.
B. Inexplicably blow all the ballast tanks and sink silently to the bottom.
C. Work marginally well for thirty minutes before ceasing all functions and requiring online registration."
MS is definitely increasing their influence in academia through large scale donations. I don't know if that was the reason that Flordia went with Windows, but I have seen it elsewhere. When I ran a school engineering project, we received a computer from Intel. I then received a letter in the mail from Microsoft requesting that a sponsorship sticker be placed on our vehicle. Seeing as how the first thing I did was wipe Windows off that donated machine, I declined.
Only underwater and in space, is the vacuum of suck, produced by Windows, useable to it's full potential.
I was part of the Amador team, the only H.S at the competition. We placed 5th, which isn't too shabby :).
This year, I think that teams had a lot more bad luck than previous years -- one teams, the univ. of victoria, had their lead programmer / team leader leave 2 days before the competition, after deciding that sub's just "weren't his thing." Since they used custom PIC circuitery etc, they were basically screwed.
We a catastrophe happen to us as well -- our PC104 computer fried hours before the qualifying run. We then started looking at using a basic stamp as our main computer -- amazingly powerful little things, they allow something like 16 serial IO ports.
Red Windshield of Death
That's because of the new Windows Vista critical error, or the RSOD, which has been implemented for easier determination of serious crashes.
Oh, you meant blood on the windshield... Nevermind.
Microsoft Sucks, F/OSS Rocks. I get mod points now right?
I agree, and what I found was simply by talking to the teams.. I really think AUVAI should have an "after the fact" type page, with comments by different teams as to why they did so well / bad.
You can read on the AUVAI webpage the breakdown of points... if one copmletes the mission, all the others are basically irrelevants (such as static judging). However, since so many people were not able to complete the mission, these points become important for seperating out the bottom of the stack. Basically, teams 1-4 where the only teams able to complete part of the mission (I don't believe anyone was able to complete the entire mission).
I think as regards problems... I know for us it was our PC104 stack getting destroyed by some short in the endcap... For Univ of Victoria, they had communication troubles between their custom PIC boards, and didn't have the original guy on their team who made them anymore (apparently he dumped the team 2 days before the competition, and didn't return their emails). For Rhode Island, I know that their bouyancy system, which is kinda neat actually (they use a compression cylinder to change their bouyancy) somehow leaked, and flouded their tube. For the rest of the teams, I'm not so sure, but they were similar problems. I think everyone suffers from reliability issues, not technical sophistication problems -- everyone has these amazing technologies that are all very impressive. The problem comes with the intergration of all these components into one vehicle.
From the wierd but true files:
The cali cartel wanted to use submarines, and actually bought one Colombian Cartels Hum with High Tech (Newsmax).
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.
Yeah, I'm all for the machine age but my kid, who is seven can do this after his usual breakfast of two Eggo waffles, a glass of orange juice, and a bowl of sugar, er cereal:
All without Windows. And he's basically open source, too boot!
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
Found: duck tape
Processing...
Multiple possibilities found...
1. To decrease height rapidly because a sticky film has been thrown in your direction ("Duck! Tape!")
2. An adhesive strip that is used to attach together two or more types of water fowl
3. A far-too-common misspelling for duct tape (see: their/they're, to/too, your/you're)
The most likely cause is (3). Because of the nature of the original message (submarine, thus water-based), it is possible that the original message is in reference to (2). This is, however, unlikely.
bash-3.00#
As I heard it from one of the competitors, the water was all murky and none of the teams' algorithms worked.
Time to preorder water samples for next year.
Go Felix!
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Let us not forget that as the black hat prey evolve the white hat predators do, too, and the latter usually have more funding.
So, if we imagine those stealthy microcrimsubs creeping up to a lonely San Diego beach, we might as well also imagine them bumping their little snouts 100 yards offshore into the dog pod grid. Bzzt snap glub glub glub. Problem solved!
Movies to the contrary, I sort kinda suspect the bulk of criminal smuggling is low tech. You just pay a dumfuk mule a G to take this "package of condoms" across the border, saying it's hers, and then give it to Hernando on the other side, who'll give her another 2 G's. If she gets busted, you're out less than the cost of a minicrimsub, you don't tip off the G-men to your methodology, and there are fewer material clues pointing back to your secret base under the crater of the extinct volcano.
Kudos from this high school CS instructor to Amador on their 5th place finish. They should be commended for their effort. It not easy pulling together all the resources and getting kids to stay on task all year. Well done.
Personally, I'd like to see more of this kind of thing offered as an alternative to the AP curriculum. Sorry, java simulations of fish in a lake doesn't cut it with generation-E. This stuff however, fires imaginations.
"Sup yo, we got like 5th or something."
"We're like smart 'n shizzle yo'."
"How you gettin' home?"
"Madre yo'. We'll load this b-itchell in the back of the Tahoe. Don't smell no mo' yo'."
"Koo."
"...the UF team ran Windows XP on their embedded computer." Famous last words.
I really enjoyed the spirit of communication among all the competitors in the past two years I've done this.
I was wondering if we should set up some kind of community (mailing list, forum, whatever) to share ideas.
My team (UTD) had leakage problems too, and I think that's the kind of thing we can avoid if we all have a way to get together and share input.
No one on /. has EVER seen a Linux B(lack)SOD right?
I've seen more kernel panics on Linux machines than I've seen BSOD's on 2k/xp machines in the last 4 years. I hate to tell you but you are throwing stones in glass houses here...
It was you who altered the thrust mechanism!
Would have been nice to mention that 2nd place was ETS in the post and not MIT, Cornell or Duke...
n dings.cfm
Nice work guys! Wished I could have done so well while I was in the team:
http://www.auvsi.org/competitions/2005/05finalsta
Note that the submarine has always been using Linux as the main OS except for the first year where it was just microcontrollers:
http://sonia.etsmtl.ca/en/ETS_jpaper_2005.pdf
In fact, I was inspired to help start a team at ETS after seeing the slashdot.org post in 1999 when MIT won with a Linux-driven AUV.
Beats the hell out of the crappy little lego mindstorm bots that we had to build at LSU for CS. It picks the little ball up and drops it in the hole. Yay.
For some reason I refuse to use either spell check or the spacebar properly.
I get it. You don't like Windows. What an original viewpoint. Seriously, these people built a submarine that works by itself, and all you people can find to talk about is the fact that it runs on Windows?
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.
The MIT representative mentioned that folks return in subsequent years. What happens to the AUVs after the competition? Do they return next year? Are they donated or put on display at the school? I'm impressed by the high school team - how much time did people spend to build their AUV? Kudos to all.
Once again, Stevens Institute of Technology is nowhere to be seen. Previously, the school ranked:
1998 - 2nd
1999 - Honorable Mention
2000 - 8th
2001 - 12th
Notice a trend? It's a symptom of an underlying problem @ what used to be one of the best tech schools in the nation.
[o]_O
Being a former Subjugator Team Member, I can tell you that Linux has been used on this robot since the beginning. Redhat was originally used, then Slackware was used last year. Windows was used this year because Microsoft helped them upgrade from a 700 MHz Pentium III to the Pentium M they used on this robot. Anyways, the embedded computer is only used for image processing. All the control of the robot is processed by an Atmel Microcontroller. The windows computer can get a BSOD and the robot will still work :). Read the journal paper at http://www.subjugator.org/. Lots of good info. GO UF!!!
Yeah, but did they have 2 weeks and a $100 budget?
We collaborated with UF a great deal when I was at the MIT AUV Lab from '94 to '96. They do very good work.
My exact thought.
/.ers didn't get my jokes because I'm always an AC.
And I thought
Seems other (registered) people are also affected.
I've gotta put in the obligatory "Go Duke!" Also, I happen to know/work with one of the guys on the team by the name of John Felkins. John, if you happen to see this, congrats!
-Matt
Duke '05
Heck with all the schools, we should give props to the technical director! Actually, all 19 teams that came out did really well, there where no losers. It's a lot of work, and just making it that far is a great accomplishment. It's a shame that the water was so murky, but you have to give credit to Duke for finding the docking station in that soup. The top three teams where all very close.