Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

University of Maryland Team Wins Robot Sub Competition

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the holding-their-breath-all-weekend dept.

William Cox writes "A team from the University of Maryland has won the 11th Annual International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition, held in San Diego, CA, this weekend. Twenty-five teams from around the world (US, Canada, Japan, and India) built autonomous submarines to complete a series of tasks using vision recognition, autonomous navigation, and sonar. Maryland unseated the 3-time record holder, University of Florida, to win first place. University of Texas at Dallas took 2nd, and a Canadian team, École de Technologie Supérieure, took 3rd."

11 of 44 comments (clear)

  1. Robotic Cougar by Reverend528 · · Score: 2, Funny

    They built a robotic cougar. Everyone thought it was real and locked themselves indoors.

    --
    Badass Resumes
    1. Re:Robotic Cougar by 4D6963 · · Score: 3, Funny

      They built a robotic cougar. Everyone thought it was real and locked themselves indoors.

      But turned out it only was after Ashton Kutcher.

      --
      You just got troll'd!
  2. Quote from the University of Florida by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    "You sank my battleship."

    1. Re:Quote from the University of Florida by i.of.the.storm · · Score: 2

      Haha, Florida needed to lose this time, three years in a row and I guess they got kind of cocky. It didn't help that their team was mostly new recruits and their most experienced members had graduated.

      Incidentally, I was actually on the only high school team to compete, Amador Valley High School, as the main programmer, although in the end none of my code was used as our vision processing code had been untested so we just ran our sub on a PIC that another member programmed, which did low-level motor control and PID to keep the sub going straight. We had uffered a crack in our tube, which lost us a day to fix, and we hadn't realized that our motors caused huge magnetic interference with our compass, which took another day to work around. Due to these more pressing issues, we never tested our vision processing code, and it likely wouldn't have worked anyway.

      But yeah, Maryland did a great job and their performance was amazing, although I was disappointed that they didn't attempt any vision related tasks. The math for hydrophones is really difficult, but it seems like once you've got it done it's 100% guaranteed to work and since Florida got it last year it's become kind of boring to watch teams just gun straight for the recovery zone. Vision processing is a lot more fuzzy and I noticed several teams were thrown off by noise in the background. Incidentally, ETS, another amazing team (they've gotten 2nd a lot of times and they're consistently great) had actually done one of the vision processing tasks (playing blackjack) during a practice run. If they had done this during their final run they definitely would have won. Overall, the competition was a great experience and I'm going to miss it in college since my school (Berkeley) doesn't have a team in the competition, and I would probably fail if I tried to start one since I have no mechanical background.

      --
      All your base are belong to Wii.
  3. Google's roots... by PC+and+Sony+Fanboy · · Score: 2, Funny

    I think google now has genticles from everywhere, to everywhere.

  4. Paltry effort by sleeponthemic · · Score: 2, Funny

    No fricken laser beams

    --
    I record my sleeptalking
  5. I also have roots in UMD by Layth · · Score: 2, Funny

    Great CS program.
    I'll finally graduate this year.

  6. Would have been better... by Numbah+One · · Score: 2, Funny

    ...if Maryland had mounted frickin' lasers on their sub in case they encountered any sharks.

  7. Congratulations Scott and Leo! by tankrshr77 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    You guys are awesome! This was only Maryland's second year at the competition, and unlike many of the other schools, it is an undergrad club led effort in design and fundraising.

    And the head of the team is a physicist, not an engineer. There's a goofy picture of him with a pumpkin t-shirt on the team's website:
    http://ram.umd.edu/

    1. Re:Congratulations Scott and Leo! by i.of.the.storm · · Score: 2

      Yeah, our team was only two tents down from them (Amador) and I could see the amount of effort they put into their sub. They seemed really humble too, since it was only their second year at the competition, and I overhead them saying "Well, second place next to ETS wouldn't be so bad." When they got first I was so happy for them. It's kind of boring watching the same teams win over and over again (before this, the only teams that had won were MIT, UF, URI, and Cornell.) Last year though, MIT apparently had a newbish team and ranked third-last last year, and didn't come back this year. Also, if you're checking out some of the competitors' sites, I highly recommend you check out iBotics' site. Stupid Apple-knockoff name notwithstanding (I hope they aren't Apple fanboys), their sub design is really cool. It's basically a stingray made out of foam and fiberglass. They didn't do so well, but their sub is awesome.

      Sidenote: I was wondering whose network RAM-AUV was. Now I know!

      PS: Although I'm not competing next year since I graduated, you guys better watch out for Amador! We've gotten pretty close to being able to use our hydrophones to pinpoint the pinger, and we could have hit the buoy if we hadn't been so focused on simply fixing our hull and our compass we could have tested our vision and mission code and actually done something besides going straight, although for those who haven't seen the competition, going straight is impossible unless you've got some sort of feedback control system going (like PID).

      --
      All your base are belong to Wii.
  8. Robot Sub Competition by springbox · · Score: 4, Funny

    If this was the robot sub competition then what was the main robot competition?