KINGSTON – A team of 10 University of Rhode Island undergraduate and graduate students placed second in the recently concluded 10th annual International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition, sponsored by the U.S. Office of Naval Research and the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.
Twenty-eight teams from four countries – the United States, Canada, Japan and India – entered the competition. First place went to the University of Florida.
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The URI team won $4,000 for its second-place finish. (URI finished fourth last year and won the competition in 2000, the first year it entered.)
The event required the student engineers to build a miniature robotic submarine that could self-navigate and independently perform realistic missions, including: finding an underwater starting gate, docking at a buoy, following a pipeline, dropping a marker in a bin, detecting an acoustic beacon, and finding and retrieving a “treasure.”
Team Captain Michael Palmieri, a URI graduate student from Falmouth, Mass., said in a release that “half the challenge is in designing, building and programming the vehicle … The other half happens at the competition itself, adjusting to the circumstances at the venue and fixing things that might go wrong.”
In addition to the AUV-building competition, the contest included writing a journal paper and creating a Web site describing how the vehicle was designed.
The URI team was sponsored by Raytheon Co., Harris Acoustic Products, Subconn, SeaBotix, BBN Technologies and the URI Partnership for Ocean Instrumentation. To learn more, visit the team’s Web site at www.oce.uri.edu/~auv.
