9th Annual AUV Competition Results

Sean.D.Matthews writes "This weekend the 9th 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, dropping markers in marked bins along a pipeline, and surfacing in a recovery zone marked by an acoustic pinger. Teams from MIT, Cornell, Duke and eighteen others competed for the grand prize. After an intense final round, the University of Florida's Team SubjuGator walked away with the victory for a second year in a row. Interestingly, the UF team ran Windows XP embedded on SubjuGator's on-board computer."

Comments

Oh come now

[Stephen Tennant]

Interestingly, the UF team ran Windows XP embedded on SubjuGator's on-board computer.

Is there a troll tag?

Biological solutions to mechanical limitations.

[Jerk City Troll]

While we are good at developing machinery and electronics, programming AI into the system has always been the problem. The solution: Borrow an existing solution from nature. All you need is an insect, rat, or reptile to interface with the device and for them to obtain feedback with sensors it would closely be accustomed too. Just imagine for a moment using a pigeon mounted inside a scramjet with the only purpose to get an item from point A to B in a battle field autonomously. How about using rodents to operate a robotic vehicle provide surveillance or rescue missions. The list goes on.

Re:Biological solutions to mechanical limitations.

[Jerk City Troll]

Think Strogg.

The simple fact is that while we use senses in our bodies to do things, the similar versions for robots and autonomous vehicles are crude, expensive, and no-one is quite sure how to make them work the way we think they should. Computer vision is becoming a big thing, and despite the millions of people working with it or on it around the globe, there is still no standard way to immitate what a biological organism does with one eye, let alone two.Then there is that inner-ear thing, and this tells us many things: if we are vertical, falling, rising, moving forward or sideways... Our eyes do way more than a movie camera does. People are only now beginning to understand how many ways that we analyze the visual data presented to us through our eyes.

Fortunately the problems of autonomous underwater vehicles similar to planes and they are not as bad as the problems faced by ground-based vehicles. On the surface, there is so much to run into, get stuck on, fall off of etc. Just writing some code to keep a toy robot from getting stuck under the kitchen table is a huge task without boatloads of sensory data and processing power.

The tasks these vehicles are trying to accomplish ARE that difficult, well, using animal brains might help.

There are two groups you can try if you are interested in finding out more about hobbyists that are working on these problems http://www.dprg.org/ and http://www.seattlerobotics.org/index.php. There are many others, of course, but these two are fairly active groups.