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Team Sonia Takes Prize at RoboSub 2011
An anonymous reader writes "The RoboSub 2011 competition final was held on July 17. Each year, teams from around the world gather to see who has the best autonomous underwater vehicle. The goal of the competition is to complete an obstacle course with no human intervention. This year a team from Montreal, Canada — team SONIA AUV from ETS — won first place." Read on for a list of the top-placing teams.
- 1st Place: ETS Team SONIA (awarded $7,000)
- 2nd Place: Cornell University (awarded $4000)
- 3rd Place: University of Florida (awarded $3,000)
- 4th Place: Reykjavik University (awarded $2,000)
- 5th Place: University of Maryland (awarded $500)
- 6th Place: University of Rhode Island ($500)
- 7th Place: United States Naval Academy
- 8th Place: NC State
I'm in Montreal, go ETS! Yay!
Mostly random stuff.
Oh, the shame! My niece is entering her third year at the academy, and her brother just joined her there a few weeks ago. I can't see them joining this competition next year, though. She wants to be an MD, and he wants to fly fighter jets.
If I remember correctly, this is their second year in the competition. Last year, they had their robot flood during one of the earlier days and they worked the entire time to get it running again. They managed to get the robot to move past the gate after having a complete system failure.
Congratulations on 4th place! And I'm happy ETS finally won.
(former member of the University of Maryland team)
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/30/1426214
Well, obviously not. Aside from the cool factor, that earlier story really stuck with me because it was so inspirational and was a beautiful illustration of so much that is wrong with the political priorities of our current society.
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
I was trying to think of how they debug the embedded code on this thing. Probably using a data logger.
I found this paper interesting about the software running on the sub:
http://sonia.etsmtl.ca/assets/files/publication-en/2007-USNA-Reconfigurable_mission_system.pdf
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." -- Albert Einstein
No, but seriously, someone has got some explaining to do. Inadequate resources? Or if the financial/ engineering resources were available, a worrying lack of innovative resource or a major fuck-up in management (I don't envisage an [Any Country] Naval Academy team being hot on brainstorming out-of-the-box ideas, at least not without having to get the plans past the Officer In Charge of the project first.)
Or maybe the higher placed institutions really do have naval engineering talent vastly in advance of that at the Naval Academy. In which case, the Recruitment Department has got some major explaining to do.
Coming soon : Navy SEALS Press Gang detained by portly Montreal Security Guard.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Cornell University had a near perfect run, immediately followed by a change in lighting conditions during the finals which resulted in their last run being modest by comparison. Computer Vision technology is flakey at best and virtually useless the rest of the time.
I didn't pay much attention to Team Sonia or the Naval Academy however everyone at this competition was worthy of praise. The school flag being flown has virtually nothing to do with outcomes in this competition.
Team advisor, team captain, team members, school. Those are the criteria in order which actually impact the outcome. If any one of those falls down on the job, the entire team performance will suffer despite the best efforts of every other link in the chain.
IIRC, the US Naval Academy had hardware failure that prevented them from performing as well as expected. Furthermore, I don't think you should expect their undergraduates to be somehow better than their counterparts from elite engineering schools with research departments into robotics.
And to the AC, yes, everyone did do well no doubt. But for a country that so visibly depends on it's military to project it's opinions on the rest of the world, the failure to be even in contention is a problem.
"hardware failure" is an inadequate excuse. When I have a hardware failure in my scuba breathing gear, I don't die, I switch to my alternative system and at the worst do an "under-control abort".
I can imagine the excuses coming into The Admiralty for the "Chariots" mission : "Sorry sir, we had a hardware failure. The Tirpitz is still a viable threat." In fact the story was "We had multiple hardware failures and lost several men, but the Tirpitz is disabled for the foreseeable future."
I wonder if any of the equipment is still on the bottom of Loch Cairnbawn? That would be a helluva a dive - 80m if I recall the charts properly.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
You seem to be confusing the US Naval Academy with the Office of Naval Research. One had 3 undergraduate students working with a budget of something like $5k in their free time for a collegiate competition and the other produces research vessels and weapons of the future. But, hey, it's not like you can be asked to understand what TFA is about let alone read it.
It probably has more to do with the time that the students put in. I had a relatively small team at UF, with 7 students this year, but we started working on our sub a few weeks after last years competition and probably put in over 10,000 man-hours into our new sub. I would guess that Cornell and ETS had similar (or larger) time investment. I assume that the even smaller Naval Academy team could not put in this kind of time effort, even if they wanted to. Don't they have a host of other commitments that the other universities do not have? We could work through the night any time we desired; can students from the Naval Academy team do this?
If they choose names that make them look like military, then that's how they can expect to be treated.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"