URI engineering students place 4th in
international underwater robotics competition
Team brings home $3,000 prize
With a travel grant from Rhode Island Sea Grant, 3 URI AUV team members and their advisor traveled to San Diego for the hotly contested International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition at the beginning of August. Two additional team members came on their own to help take on the stiff competition. They brought with them a brand new vehicle built from scratch in one year with lots of hard work, and sponsorship from Raytheon, Subconn Connectors, Harris Acoustic Products Corp., SeaBotix Robotics Corporation., and BBN Technologies. The vehicle has 4 thrusters with robot combat controllers, 2 cameras, an acoustic homing system, and 6 microcomputers.
The team received top marks from the judges for building an impressive new vehicle in record time. Coupled with the scores for their web site and technical journal paper the team entered the in-water competition in 3rd place. The in-water competition consists of a series of challenging tasks for the robots to accomplish all on their own. In the preliminary round 21 teams took their turns at finding the starting gate underwater, following a pipeline to a specific location to mark, surfacing then submerging at an acoustic beacon, and homing in on a docking station; all within 15 minutes without any human intervention. At the end of the preliminary round an unprecedented 7 teams had qualified for the finals, including 4 teams who have won in previous years (MIT, Cornell, URI, and Univ. of Florida), with MIT the perennial favorite.
The finals were hotly contested, with URI recovering just in time from a failed motor controller and birthing pains from its all new systems. The first URI run was off the mark, but a quick reprogramming and restart put URI,s CMS Skate next to the beacon’s bull’s-eye, then down and back along the pipe line for a great run that earned the team a $3000 prize and 4th place. ETS Canada and Univ. of Florida also had great runs, with Duke pulling off a truly outstanding run to move from 6th to 2nd. The rankings for the 2006 finalists are shown below:
1 Univ. of Florida,
2 Duke,
3 ETS Canada,
4 URI,
5 Univ. of Texas at Dallas,
6 MIT,
7 Cornell.
The URI competition team members included 3 undergraduate engineering students, 2 graduate engineering students, and 1 of the two faculty advisors. Prof. Miller was unable to attend:
2006 URI AUV competition team members:
Co-Captain: Erik Kelly (UG-OCE)
Co-Captain: Alison LaFerriere (UG-EE)
Member: Alex Sanguinetti (UG-OCE)
Member: Darren Flynn (G-OCE)
Member: Huikwan Kim (G-OCE / Lt. -Korean Navy)
Advisor: Prof. Robert Tyce (OCE)
Co-Captain Kelly described the new URI vehicle as a three-foot long tube containing all of the electronic components which sits on a triangular base. It uses four thrusters for propulsion – two in the rear that propel it forward and backward and two angled thrusters on the side that move it up and down and from side to side.
“It’s a unique design that gave us an unprecedented level of mobility,” said Kelly, who noted that the visibility generated by the competition has already resulted in two job offers. “Almost everything in the vehicle was custom designed by our team, unlike other teams who went out and bought high-end equipment off the shelf.” Prof. Tyce, one of the team’s advisors (with Prof. Miller), indicated that the $3000 prize and a winning new design will put URI’s team in excellent position for next years competition. In addition Ocean engineering this fall has added a new engineering elective in Robotic Ocean Instrumentation (OCE360) that will include work on AUV systems for team members. He encourages any engineering or computer science students with interests in robotics to join URI’s team for next year’s competition. Teams members left to right are Huikwan Kim, Alex Sanguinetti, Erik Kelly, Darren Flynn and Alison LaFerriere.
URI engineering students place 4th in international underwater robotics competition
Thursday, August 31, 2006
