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8th Annual AUV Competition Results

Posted by timothy on from the blub-blub-blub-whirrrrrrr dept.

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."

11 of 137 comments (clear)

  1. XP Embedded by malelder · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:XP Embedded by a16 · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:XP Embedded by joepeg · · Score: 3, Funny

      "This is the captain speaking..."

      "What are your coordinates?"

      "0x0000007B (0xF741B84C,0xC0000034,0x00000000,0x00000000) INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE"

      --

      ZEN is a prime number in base-36

  2. When something goes wrong by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Does it show the Blue Screen of Depth?

  3. Debain powered contestant by demachina · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  4. is this the same competition by ccordero · · Score: 4, Funny

    where MIT lost against high school students>?

    1. Re:is this the same competition by briankoenig · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  5. Best new entry was awarded to Georgia Tech by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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!

  6. Re:Cornell Sub by badgerz · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  7. My thoughts (On Amador Team) by Hex4def6 · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  8. Re:Cornell Sub by Hex4def6 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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...