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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."
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!
Yes, Amador Valley is where I went to highschool, and my Junior year the UAV team beat all the other competitors, including MIT. This year they placed 5th, still very respectable for a high school with an (assumably) much smaller budget than these colleges. Not absolutely positive, but the year that Amador won, the budget was $3k. Funny thing is that although the UAV competition is prestigious, even when we won 1st almost nobody outside of the sciences on campus noticed.
Worth noting that in this case it appears they are not running XP Embedded, they are instead just running a standard version of XP Pro on a Pentium M board, according to this page.
i dont know who the original poster is, but i was actually on the CUAUV team, and was actually at this competition. UF absolutely deserved their victory, their submarine performed phenomenally well, and was incredibly light and tiny. a job extremely well done by them. as for sour grapes, none of us on the team have absolutely any hard feelings. we're in this for the fun, for the engineering, and to advance the state of the art. not to buffer our egos.
I agree -- we were next to them in the tents (Amador), and I can tell you that I don't think I ever saw them open the tube of their sub, which means that they basically had all the hardware sorted before coming to the competition, and only had to focus on a few software bugs. I was impressed with their team. Of course, they did have a PHD student, and all the others seemed to already have bachelors / masters degrees, but still...