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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."
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.
Does it show the Blue Screen of Depth?
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
where MIT lost against high school students>?
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.
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.
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!
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.
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...
I think you're thinking of the feel-good article in wired a few months back about the broke highschool team that beat MIT.. This is a different competition, although I think by the same organizers. The Wired article covered a ROV style competition, while this one is autonomous only... significantly harder. :)
They won, even with that handicap? I'm impressed.
(Speaking as someone with a PhD :) )
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.