2010 AUVSI RoboSub Competition
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Friday, 30 of July , 2010 at 12:16 am
The 2010 International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition took place last week, and the very first thing that happened was that everybody decided that they’d much rather spend their time building robot subs as opposed to gasping out the name of the competition, so it’s now just called “RoboSub.” These RoboSubs are autonomous (not remote controlled), so the competition operates kinda like the DARPA Grand or Urban Challenge: you push the go button, and then your robot is on its own, and you can do nothing but sit back and have an anxiety attack.
As you can see from the vid, the bots have a lot of fairly complicated tasks to perform, and I imagine that being underwater causes a whole host of sensor issues… For example, several tasks require the robots to differentiate colored objects, and colors change underwater depending on depth as the red light gets filtered out. Not to mention the whole water not mixing with electronics thing…
Day 2 and the day 3 final, after the jump.
[ AUVSI RoboSub ]
Comments (9)
Category: Competitive,Research
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Comment by joe
Made Tuesday, 3 of August , 2010 at 10:53 am
This was actually the 13th year of the competition. I’m the grad advisor for Robotics@Maryland (placed 3rd of 22), and can say that the capabilities of some of these vehicles is absolutely amazing. I’m glad to see botjunkie is covering it!
Some more food for thought on how difficult the competition is: navigation for subs can’t rely on GPS (GPS signals only penetrate a few inches in the water), there’s no contact with the ground (so you can’t use encoders), and substantial random currents render dead reckoning worthless. The teams that can afford it buy a Doppler Velocity Logger (costs around $20k) to give them ground-track velocity.
Water is a difficult environment in which to maneuver. Teams must either make a vehicle that is so large that it can’t spin out of control or make a vehicle that can control its 3D orientation as well as 3D position. There is a strict penalty for large vehicles, so most teams opt for fancy control. It is worthwhile to note that in some years of this competition only a third of the teams could actually drive underwater in a straight line.
Competition objectives include not just visual tasks which are difficult underwater (light patterns caused by sunlight passing through the surface are called caustics and make shape recognition challenging) but acoustic objectives as well. The highest-scoring competition objectives require a passive sonar system.
If you go to the AUVSI RoboSub webpage, you should be able to find links to all the teams’ individual webpages. Most teams post a really good writeup of their robot.
Comment by Evan Nelson
Made Wednesday, 11 of August , 2010 at 4:28 am
i suffered from anxiety attacks and my doctor put me on anti-depressants ..
Comment by Security Light ·
Made Sunday, 7 of November , 2010 at 8:08 am
anxiety attacks really suck, i hate it when i have these kind of attacks on myself _
Comment by vitamin h
Made Wednesday, 6 of July , 2011 at 11:59 pm
i suffered from anxiety attacks and it was really a bad experience. it is as if you are going to great crazy and have the feeling of choking.’
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