RoboSub 2018

AVBotz is a team of passionate high school students from Amador Valley High School in Pleasanton, CA. We have competed in RoboSub since 1999 and are one of the few high school teams who participate in this competition. The club is open to any student that demonstrates interest in robotics and a willingness to learn, garnering a reputation for turning aspiring young students into competent engineers and computer scientists. Our team includes over 40 students encompassing 4 subdivision: Business, Electrical, Mechanical, and Software. In RoboSub 2016, we unveiled Marlin, our newest submarine. Recognizing mistakes of the past two years after the debut of Marlin, this year we have focused on enhancing the processing power aboard our submarine. From the addition of a DVL to new Machine Learning algorithms using a GPU, this processing power opened up the capability of Marlin to complete this year’s new and more complicated tasks. With the most powerful vehicle in the club history, this year has been all about perfecting Marlin’s capability and expanding Marlin to adapt to the new competition rules. This year, AVBotz is seeking to regain the past glory of placing in finals at Robosub 2018.

Beaver Country Day School

BeaverAUV

Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, USA

BeaverAUV is a diverse group of Beaver Country Day School students who use the creation of an AUV as a pathway for hands-on learning of robotics. Our team is comprised of 16 team members with varieties of backgrounds, interests, ages, and skill levels. Through the creation of an AUV, our team learns technical skills such as mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and computer science, but also other skills such as teamwork and perseverance. These fields must all be combined and managed in order to be successful throughout the process of designing, building, and testing. Adapting was also increasingly important as we learned by iterating, failing, and trying new things. Our excitement and passion for the topic and content has pushed us to grow as a team and individually. This year was certainly a learning process as both of our founding members graduated and moved on to college. Through this adversity comes growth. As a new wave of members join the team, we find that knowledge is passed down from older members to the new members, creating an atmosphere of learning and education that allows older members to be both essential members of the team as well as teachers. The sub has been significantly simplified in the past year. In result, these simplifications allow the AUV to run more efficiently and be programmed with greater ease. Also, with this simplification, more modules can be added into the new found space within the AUV. With these improvements, we hope that our AUV can perform better and unlock future improvements.

California State University, Fullerton

Titan AUV

Fullerton, California, USA

Facebook

Technical Design Report

Titan AUV is an undergraduate student project from the California State University, Fullerton. This will be the first year participating in the AUVSI Foundation RoboSub competition and we are excited to be participating as this competition provides students with hands-on experience in artificial intelligence, image processing and underwater navigation. When we first began this project, we were not sure what to expect but we have made great progress and are looking forward to seeing the results our vehicle will produce on the course.

California State University, Los Angeles

AUVCalStateLA

Los Angeles, California, USA

The goal of the AUVCalStateLA team is to design, build, and test autonomous underwater vehicles to compete in the annual AUVSI RoboSub Competition. Our team is run by undergraduate students and is open to all students from freshman to senior levels. We are committed to bringing real-world experience to students as they learn to solve complex problems and build connections between science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics. We hope to provide a safe and fun environment for the development of autonomous systems to foment high-level thinkers concerned with social and environmental issues.

Cornell University

Cornell University Autonomous Underwater Vehicle

Ithaca, New York, USA

CUAUV is a completely undergraduate project team at Cornell University. The team is composed of 45 students, spanning 8 majors, that competes in AUVSI’s international Robosub competition. Each year, we design, build, program, and test two completely new autonomous submarines. In July, we ship our subs down to San Diego, put it in a 200’x300′ Navy testing pool, press the green button, and cheer it on as it navigates a complicated underwater obstacle course with no human intervention whatsoever. Two years ago, CUAUV was the first team to develop two vehicles in parallel, forever changing the way teams compete. Last year was focused on building upon our success with two submarines, and our hard work was realized in July when Artemis and Apollo took home the team’s seventh first place win at the 20th Annual RoboSub. This year, CUAUV is aiming to once again revolutionize the way AUVs are used. With our newest vehicles, Castor and Pollux, we intend to complete the RoboSub course faster than ever before. A new Teledyne Pathfinder DVL will allow our vehicles to sense the field with higher resolution and speed. A completely new mechanical design will innovate the way our vehicles moves in the water. A dual electrical system will allow for improved efficiency across all systems as well as open the door for intervehicle communication. CUAUV is more than ready to reimagine AUVs for the 2018 RoboSub competition.

École de Technologie Supérieure

S.O.N.I.A. AUV ETS

Montreal, Québec, Canada

Team SONIA AUV from École de Technologie Supérieure in Montreal, went through a team overhaul this year. Only three members out of nine were at the 20th ROBOSUB and are part of the team this year. With a fresh, young and dynamic team, passing along the information was part of the test. The new members rise to the challenge and helped better the team. For instance, the mechanical and electrical teams worked hand in hand to add a torpedo and dropper system on the submarine. Meanwhile, the software team made some major adjustments to satisfy the needs of the competition. They focused on image recognition using machine learning. A GPU was added in the submarine to satisfy our needs. All our efforts are thanks to the continuous support of the school administration that has been the backbone of our project. SONIA AUV has its fair share of victories and challenges in recent years. Nevertheless, our strength lies within our team spirit and leadership in each member. We are ready to represent our country and city at the ROBOSUB competition and fight for the first place.

Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Robotics Association

Team Yellowfin

Daytona Beach, Florida, USA

Far Eastern Federal University/Institute for Marine Technology Problems

FEFU/IMTP AUV

Vladivostok, Russia

Website | Twitter

The team of the Far Eastern Federal University for autonomous underwater vehicles was formed for the first time in 2011. Mentors of the students were employees of the Institute for Marine Technology Problems. For the first time the team took part in an international competition in summer 2012, at the Robosub. That time, students and graduate students of the FEFU reached the final and took the 5th place, having received the prize for the best new team. At that time, the team had 1 mechanical 1 electrical 3 software engineers. The amount of team members was not enough to effectively solve all the problems that arise, so in 2012 the first large number of students went to the team. It’s funny that the number of mechanical and electrical engineers in the team remained unchanged. However, the number of software developers increased to 7-8 people. In March 2013, the team participated in another international competition – the Singapore AUV Challenge, which was organized for the first time by members of the acoustic research laboratory (ARL) at the National University of Singapore. The team of FEFU took first place. Now, the FEFU / IPMT team on underwater robotics regularly participates in the competitions Robosub and SAUVC and has a list of achievements. Since the team’s first participation in 2012, 4 different vehicles were created.

Here is the list of achievements of the team

Robosub 2012 – 5 place
SAUVC 2013 – 1 place
Robosub 2013 – 3 place
Robosub 2014 – 4 place
SAUVC 2015 – 2 place
Robosub 2015 – 6 place
SAUVC 2016 – 2 place
SAUVC 2017 – 1 place
Robosub 2017 – 2 place
SAUVC 2018 – 3 place

Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ)

UFRJ Nautilus

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

UFRJ Nautilus team is a student engineering group of Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) focused on naval and submarine automation. Our undergraduate students design, build and program an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) at low cost. The Nautilus AUV, called BRHUE, is programmed to perform a mission completely autonomously, without human interaction or any other remote operator. UFRJ Nautilus main goal is to compete, for the second time, on Robosub 2018, since it had participated before in the year of 2016. The team is the first and only competitor from Brazil to participate in RoboSub, and consists of 30 students from different backgrounds and courses. The team was founded in 2016, by 8 undergrad engineering students, as a way to motivate them to create high-end technology and to feel engaged with the Engineering. Therefore, Robosub became the gateway for the group to start working on an innovative automation project, generating many positive results. With the intention to keep innovating, Robosub 2018 became a new opportunity to show a more advanced project. Nowadays, the robot can perform different tasks, such as fire torpedoes at targets and grab objects. The team offers a great academic and practical experience for its members, combining research conducted in the classroom and a hands-on approach to training.

Georgia Institute of Technology

Atlanta, Georgia, USA

We are students at Georgia Tech who are interested in robots and boats! Our team consists of mainly undergraduate students, but we have one graduate student advisor. The team is a mix of different engineering majors including aerospace, electrical, mechanical, and computer science. This year’s sub builds off our fresh design revealed at last year’s competition, and is using an entirely new software stack from our previous years. We are excited to show the fruits of our labor at this year’s competition and can’t wait to kick some Robobutt! (Hopefully not our own…)

Gonzaga University

GU RoboSub

Spokane, Washington, USA

Facebook

The GU RoboSub Team is a young project that began at Gonzaga 4 years ago and has finally reached the point where we can attend competition for the first time. Comprised of a diverse group of engineers from all skill levels, our primary objective is to learn more about practical hands-on experience while working on a multidisciplinary project, and to enjoy creating something incredibly complicated and fascinating. We are all looking forward to attending the competition, so we can learn more about all the details to pass on to the incoming freshman and build a solid foundation for their success in future competitions. Everything we do is new to the team, but we’ve taken each challenge in stride to build a team that will continue to gain momentum and become a prevalent entity in the RoboSub and AUV community. We also hope to offer something new to the competition this year, and have fun as we put all our hard work to the test

Harbin Engineering University

HEU-AUV

Harbin, Heilongjiang, China

Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay

AUV-IITB

Powai, Mumbai, India

AUV-IITB comprises of highly enthusiastic and hard working technocrats ranging from brighteyed freshmen to driven senior undergraduates and tech-experienced post-graduates spanning various branches of engineering like Mechanical, Electrical, Software, Aerospace, Material Science, Civil, etc. We are a relatively young team to RoboSub family. We do not know our place yet, we do not know our limits yet but to us this means that we do not have a limit. We are ready for the competition to give it a try – young and fresh

Kasetsart University

ZEABUS

Bangkok, Thailand

Due to more demanding energy and wider ranges of operations, domestic development of subsea technologies to support local oil and gas industries gain more significant and necessary to Thailand. Based on this need, in 2013, Kasetsart University (KU) established a research and development program for Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) and Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) to develop in-house technologies with PTTEP as the main sponsor. According to this program, students who are interested in this topic have formed a team to participate in Robosub since 2014. The goal of this participation is to encourage students to learn and understand AUV technologies from practical environment through the competition so that they can use their experiences for further upstream research and development. Additionally, students must face realworld problem-solving and teamwork environment. In our first competition, our team, named SKUBA, reached the semi-final round and get the 18th rank. Zeabus has been our name since 2015. We use this name for both our team and our AUV. In Robosub 2016, students from Chulalongkorn University joined our team forming a powerful group. That year, we achieved the fifth world ranking from the competition. This year, we form a multi-disciplinary team consisting students from Aerospace Engineering, Electrical Engineering, and Computer Engineering. Our Zeabus AUV is evolved in several considerable factors such as faster operation, greater precision, and easier to maintenance. Our team is organized into 4 groups: mechanical, electrical, software, and sensor group in which each student can select based on individual expertise. Moreover, most of the team members has gained reminiscent first-time experience by participating the AUV competition named SAUVC in Singapore. Obviously, we are very excited to do our best in Robosub 2018.

Kennesaw State University

Autonomous Underwater Vehicle

Marietta, Georgia, USA

We are a group of students who compete in the AUVSI International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) Competition. Our goal is to compete with other universities and to provide students with a creative outlet so they can gain hands-on experience. We must build an autonomous underwater vehicle for this competition. Our AUV must complete a mission which consists of a set of tasks. We must follow specific rules and our AUV must meet certain requirements. Points will be given for the tasks completed. Points will also be given for our team’s website, journal paper, uniform, and AUV. It is also possible to earn bonus points for meeting certain weight requirements.

Kyushu Institute of Technology

Kyutech Underwater Robotics

Kitakyushu City, Fukuoka, Japan

Website | Facebook

Kyutech Underwater Robotics team is a group of researchers, students and teachers under Ishii Laboratory at Kyushu Institute of Technology, Japan. This team was the first Asian team to join RoboSub Competition, and still the only Japanese team involved in it. We are specialized in creating underwater vehicles and studying their behavior. Our team members come from different countries and have different background and knowledge. The team consists of 12 members. Among these members there are people from Canada, Korea, Syria, Italy and Japan. We are specialized in Machinery, Circuitry and Software development and the team is divided into the following groups: Mechanical, Electrical and software, but it is structured in order to make all the members share the knowledge from the various groups.

McGill University

McGill Robotics

Montreal, Québec, Canada

McGill Robotics is an interdisciplinary engineering design team based at McGill University and comprising of over 180 students. Undertaking several projects, both technical and educational, we strive for excellence and promote learning. This is evident in our team’s motto: “Inspiring students to build robots, and building robots to inspire students.” Each year, we design and manufacture several robots and for the past several years, these robots have been an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV), a Mars Rover, and a Fixed-Wing Autonomous Drone. Each robot presents unique challenges and ample opportunities for our members to gain valuable practical experience. Our team is extremely diverse, hailing from all throughout our university’s engineering, science, and even arts programs. We give equal opportunity to students from all backgrounds and levels of experience, so long as they share our passion for robotics. This year, our AUV project team consisted of around 30 members. Starting in late Fall of 2017, we have welcomed many new faces to the team and have designed and manufactured a brand new robot, Clarke. Building on the progress of previous years, we focused on stabilizing existing systems and achieving some missed goals from last year, such as integrating our new DVL. We’re excited to be able to compete at Robosub again and can’t wait to get Clarke into the waters of TRANSDEC!

(For more information, check out our team’s website: mcgillrobotics.com)

Maritime State University / Centre for Robotics Development

MSU&CRD AUV Team

Vladivostock, Russia

AUV team of Maritime State University named after Admiral G.I.Nevelskoy is based in Vladivostok, Russia. The renegade students of Far Eastern Federal University, who participated in underwater robotics competitions for a few years and were looking for a new challenge, founded our team in 2015. They managed to build a strong team out of nothing due to support of the MSU authorities. The team ended up on the third place during RoboSub2015, which was amazing. The roster of the team changes during the time. Former beginners now are mature leaders of the team trying to teach newcomers the essence of AUV building. This year, we increased our reliability and added a few features to increase performance of our vehicle. Our team members – all MSU students and our mentors are MSU engineers with great experience. This year our goal is to win RoboSub2017 and we are looking forward it!

Montana State University

RoboCats

Bozeman, Montana, USA

The Montana State University Robosub team is made up of about 9 members overseen by our team advisor Dr. Jim Becker and supported by our sponsors at NAVSEA. This year we had a 5- person senior design class in charge of our mechanical and electrical design and construction. In addition, we have 3 club members that have assisted in machining, testing, as well as overseeing all of the software development. Overall, we have three ME, one MET, 3 EE, and one CS major.

National University of Singapore

Bumblebee Autonomous Systems

Singapore

Website | Facebook

Team Bumblebee, from the National University of Singapore (NUS), comprises undergraduates from the various disciplines of Mechanical, Electrical, Computer Engineering and Computer Science. This is our 6th time participating in the International RoboSub Competition. The competition team of 11 comprises: Mechanical 1. Wei Han 2. Luke

Electrical 1. Ren Jie 2. Zhi Jie 3. Ren Zhi 4. Weng Fei

Software 1. Ruth 2. Wei Hong 3. Wilson

PR 1. Eng Wei 2. Zhi Hao

Staying true to our 3 years masterplan that kicked off in August 2016, we have upgraded Bumblebee Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (BBAUV) for integration with our Bumblebee Autonomous Surface Vessel (BBASV). This is in line with the team’s vision of engineering autonomous systems of the future, where we envision an autonomous maritime system operating as a system of systems with the capability to launch and recovery an AUV without the need to deploy a manned ship for the operation. For mechanical, upgrades include swapping to stronger thrusters to improve sea deployability and weight reduction achieved by integrating various housings together. For electrical, there has been a major revamp in the electrical systems of the vehicle. Other than boosting the computing power with a computer upgrade, every PCB has been redesigned for robust reliability. For software, improvements include more robust object detection using machine learning, a revamped software architecture that is maintainable and extensible, as well as a new mission planner interface to change missions on the fly.

Do find out more about us from: www.bumblebee.sg /Facebook!

North Carolina State University

Underwater Robotics

Raleigh, North Carolina, USA

We build underwater autonomous robots! The Underwater Robotics Club is student run and always open to new members from any major. Anyone who is passionate about robots is welcome to join us. The team works outside of the classroom to improve each other’s technical skills and to spread the passion of robotics throughout the community. We take our robot, Seawolf, to outreach events such as teaching elementary school students how they can get involved in robotics at an early age. Ultimately, Seawolf competes in the RoboSub Competition annually in San Diego.

North Dakota State University

NDSub Hydro Bison

Fargo, North Dakota, USA

The Hydro Bison team participating in this year’s RoboSub Competition is comprised of students from North Dakota State University (NDSU). This marks the first year of participation in RoboSub for all team members and advisors. The design process alone has been a great learning experience for the team and we are excited to participate in this year’s competition. Our team is primarily software oriented, with over half the team being computer science majors. As such, our focus has been on simulations and developing the task specific software for the competition. With this being our first year competing, it has been a particularly challenging experience as well as an excellent learning opportunity. On the mechanical side, our focus has been less on design optimization, and more on fulfilling mission requirements. This has led to a more modular design, with more flexibility in regards to potential component arrangements and configurations.

Northwestern Polytechnical University

Intelligence Marine Vehicle Innovation Team (IMVT)

Xi’an, ShaanXi, China

The Intelligence Marine Vehicle Innovation Team (IMVT) was founded in September 2014. It was supported by the graduate school. It is a new base of graduate students with marine characteristics. The base relies on the graduate innovation center of the nautical college. It selects the team members actively from the school, adopts the old members with the new members, and the group division and cooperation management model. Type. The main bases of the competition include Robosub international underwater vehicle competition, SAUVC Singapore underwater vehicle challenge, and national underwater vehicle competition. Underwater AUV is a multidisciplinary cross platform, involving many aspects of machinery, power, control, underwater acoustic, electronic and software development. The team members pass through the principles design, equipment procurement, installation and commissioning, swimming pool experiments and many other links, sacrificing holiday time and overcoming various technical difficulties under the guidance of instructors. Design various plans and finally successfully complete the competition. Team members through the competition, open up the international vision, the ability to exercise, with the international team to exchange experience, show the strong strength of our school students in the AUV field.

Oregon Institute of Technology

OTUS

Klamath Falls, Oregon, USA

Beginning in 2016, Oregon Tech Unmanned Systems (OTUS) club has been a participating team in Robonation’s Robosub Competition. Oregon Institute of Technology’s (OIT) contending team for Robosub 2018 consists of 2 main sub-teams, mechanical and software. The mechanical team is led by Kai Hattan as Club President, and features senior project members Trenton Fender and Brenston Kinoshita. Our software team is headed by Peter Stine as Club Vice-President with additional club members Jason Farell and Issara Sucharitakul. All team members are undergraduates at OIT, aside from mechanical engineering department faculty member Dr. Dongbin Lee as acting Club Advisor. OTUS presents two returning members, Kai since 2016 and Peter since 2017. Despite having a recently established engineering body, OTUS maintains its momentum in recruiting underclassmen to maximize the number of future returning members, such as Jason and Issara.

Prairie View A&M University

PV INSPIRE

Prairie View, Texas, USA

We are with Prairie View A&M University. This year team consist of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering students. This year AUV team wanted to improve the design, control, and implement the image processing on last year design. For the image processing of the team chose to implement the Gigabyte Motherboard with a Celeron processor to keep the thermal conductivity low. The camera is running through the mini itx pc and connect it to Arduino micro controller. The team programed the camera to look for an image underwater which is the same color as the markers, using Python code to track the target, and Arduino to control the thrusters and follow the target. The Arduino is connected to a MPU 6050 for its accelerometer and gyrocompass to create the IMU. We have refining the code to calibrate the IMU to provide a more accurate IMU for better stability. Controller, thrusters, and image processing are ready for mission.

Project Radian

Temecula, California, USA

We are a private rookie team stationed out of Temecula, California. We work out of the Gears 2 Robots Tech Academy, a makerspace owned by our primary sponsor, Project Radian. Our team consists primarily of high school students, with a couple of middle school students and one chemistry teacher. Most of us came from the FIRST Tech Challenge, but wanted to do something more serious this year, and so we came to robosub. This past year has been quite an adventure for us. We managed to construct a functioning prototype fairly quickly, and we were hoping to have it running in the water before 2017 was over, but we ran into over a month of waterproofing issues, learning a lot along the way. With more various hiccups, we managed to get a working submerged prototype at the begging of the summer of 2018, that ran for about 2 minutes before the onboard computer crashed from power issues. With that and the difficulty of creating a dynamic buoyancy system(a goal we set from the beginning), most of our work ended up being done this summer. Despite our challenges, this being our first year we feel lucky to be able to compete among some of the very talented teams this summer, and are very excited to get the competition underway.

San Diego City College

San Diego City Robotics

San Diego, California, USA

San Diego Robotics 101

San Diego, California, USA

San Diego Robotics 101 is a highly interdisciplinary team composed of both high school and college students from multiple universities, cities and countries. Using our experiences from the past few years, we have continued to refine our unique design, increasing its mission capabilities. This year, we took greater advantage of our cube design’s adaptability, including the addition of a mini-sub. We also introduced upgraded electronics, improved navigation algorithms, and implemented more powerful thrusters to our robot. We look forward to pushing our design even further and exploring the possibilities created by it.

San Diego State University

Mechatronics

San Diego, California, USA

San Diego State University Mechatronics was started in 2012 to help students gain real-life experience through hands-on projects conducted outside of the classroom. In fall 2013, a prototype named Hydrophobe was made as a proof of concept for future RoboSub Competitions by a team of 6 electrical, mechanical, and software engineers. Having successfully completed their prototype, Mechatronics participated in the 2014 competition as rookies and managed to get 8th place with their vehicle, Endeavour.

Drawing on the experience from their first competition, the Mechatronics team then designed a new vehicle from scratch. After one year of hard work and tremendous effort, the new Mechatronics RoboSub, Defiance, was completed for the 2015 RoboSub Competition. Mechatronics went on to win 1st place.

The next year, with an influx of passionate engineers eager to work, the team decided to not only improve Defiance, but also to create an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle called Overwatch. The team was successful in completing Overwatch, but did not it make past semifinals in the 2016 RoboSub Competition.

For the last two years, we refocused all our efforts to the RoboSub competition. We have taken all the lessons we have learned along the way and designed a new vehicle, Perseverance. It took us one year to design and fabricate Perseverance. Our passion for this project allowed us to push ourselves and improve both individually and as a team. We cannot wait to see the results at this year’s competition.

Texas A&M University

Texas Women in Engineering AUV Team (R.E.A.F.)

College Station, Texas, USA

The Ohio State University

The Underwater Robotics Team

Columbus, Ohio, USA

The Underwater Robotics Team at The Ohio State University is a student organization whose members design and build autonomous underwater vehicles at OSU’s Center for Automotive Research (CAR). UWRT aims to provide students with a unique platform to apply their coursework, tackle real engineering problems, and develop leadership skills. The robot provides opportunities to grow technical skills by applying classroom concepts, which creates wellrounded engineering students ready to succeed beyond the classroom. Furthermore, the club frequently leads STEM outreach to educate classrooms, expositions, and fairs about autonomous underwater vehicles.

University of Alberta

Autonomous Robotic Vehicle Project

Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

The Autonomous Robotics Vehicle Project (ARVP) hails from the University of Alberta, located in the wonderful city of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. ARVP was founded in 1996 as a means for students at the University of Alberta to develop, apply and promote technologies related to the field of robotics. Members of the ARVP are interdisciplinary and come from various backgrounds and faculties such as the Faculty of Engineering, Computing Science, and the Faculty of Business. These students gain the necessary skills and technical understanding of the different processes involved in the design, construction and testing of autonomous vehicles in order prepare them for a possible career in the field of robotic systems. From 1996 to 2006, ARVP was involved exclusively with ground-based autonomous vehicles and had many great successes. Since then, the focus shifted to underwater-based autonomous vehicles. This year, ARVP will be competing at Robosub 2018 with a second generation of their latest robot – Auri 2.0.

University of Arizona

Autonomous Underwater Vehicle - University of Arizona

Tucson, Arizona, USA

The Autonomous Underwater Vehicle of the University of Arizona (AUVUA) was formed in the Fall of 2012 as a College of Engineering Senior Design project. A group of six seniors successfully designed, presented, and competed with their first autonomous underwater vehicle, the ‘CATfish’.

Today, AUVUA is a ‘Design, Build, Compete’ student organization that is officially recognized by both University of Arizona student government and the UofA College of Engineering. Every two years, the club members make a submarinelike robot from scratch, going through the entire process of planning using Solidworks and build it using university machinery and equipment and materials generously given by corporate sponsors. This robot then enters in ‘RoboSub’, an annual autonomous underwater robot competition held in the beautiful city of San Diego, CA. The competition revolves around modern-day problems involving computer vision, artificial intelligence, robust data acquisition, among other things, and requires the home-brewed robot to complete a series of tasks, each worth a specific number of points, with the goal of achieving more points than other robot competitors.

AUVUA is also dedicated to the development of STEM in Southern Arizona by participating and organizing various outreach events for a wide variety of communities to participate, the most recent being Outreach for Autistic Children event, which was completed on Saturday, November 4th, 2017.

AUVUA would like to thank Intel, PNI Corp., the Carl Hayden Robotics Team, and Advanced Circuits for their generous donations during the team’s inaugural year and our current sponsors Dassault Systèmes, GitHub, Advanced Circuits.

University of British Columbia

UBC SubBots

Vancouver British Columbia, Canada

Website | Facebook

Founded in 2017 at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, Subbots is among the newest teams to compete at the 2018 Robosub competition. Subbots is a new collaborative project founded by members of the UBC Snowbots Autonomous Vehicles Team and SUBC, UBC’s Human Powered Submarine Team, that focuses on the design and fabrication of autonomous underwater vehicles. As the first UBC student design team dedicated to underwater robotics, Subbots is filling a previously unrepresented niche within UBC’s engineering community. The team has worked tirelessly to develop its first vehicle from the ground up, which will be used as a test platform for future years’ teams to test and optimize designs. In the long term, Subbots would like to solidify its position as one of UBCs most innovative teams, offering students the unique opportunity to engage with the marine industry and tackle real design challenges.

University of California Riverside

IEEE@UCR - UCR SeaDragon

Riverside, California, USA

The UCR Robosub Team was established in Fall 2015 under the UCR IEEE chapter. The current membership stands at roughly 15 undergraduates, forming a multidisciplinary team of Mechanical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Bioengineering, and Business students. The project is broken into 4 teams: Mechanical, Electrical, Software, and Business. Mechanical team designs and builds the sub’s structure. Electrical team tests the power system of the sub, as well as designs any necessary circuits. Software works on programming the sub to identify and complete the tasks using sensor readings and on-board computations. The business team is responsible for gaining funds for the project by getting sponsors and organizing fundraisers. As part of IEEE, the RoboSub Team participates in many on and off campus events to introduce STEM fields to the community, especially youth. Our project is intended to give passionate and motivated students the opportunity to work on a hands-on, team based, multidisciplinary project. We strive to develop our team members’ interests in electrical, software, and mechanical engineering. We hope this exposure to various disciplines and practice with group oriented projects will aid our members throughout their college careers and eventually in their future professions.

University of Central Florida

Robotics Club at UCF

Orlando, Florida, USA

The Robotics Club at the University of Central Florida is a group of undergraduate and graduate students with a passion for robotics. It is the group’s desire to build advanced autonomous robots for competitions and research. We are entirely student run and our projects are based around hands on work within our lab. Our club has competed in the RoboSub competition several times in the past and continues to be interested in the unique challenges offered by the underwater environment. After the second generation of our 2016 vehicle design continued to suffer from the problems of its predecessor, we chose to instead build this year’s entry around an older but simplified hull with new manipulators, electronics, and software. Our current team consists of three mechanical engineers responsible for attaching the new thrusters to the existing hull and fabricating new manipulation systems, two electrical engineers with one responsible for the overall vehicle systems and the other focusing on the hydrophone system, and a computer engineer and a modeling and simulation graduate student focusing on perception and decision making.

University of Colorado Boulder

Boulder RoboSub

Boulder, Colorado, USA

The University of Colorado Boulder Robotics Team is proud to present our 2018 competition vehicle Leviathan II. The mechanical, electrical, and software systems have been iterated upon and refined to complement the more advanced understanding of our systems. The team is coming into the competition better prepared than ever before, thanks to our new education and collaboration programs. Throughout the past year the team has worked closely with faculty and postgraduate students, to strengthen the robotics network on campus. Together we created Senior Capstone projects, built robotics based workshops and started to expand into working with research labs on campus to apply theoretical research to a real system. These efforts have developed the team’s knowledge and capabilities. Leviathan II, boasts the team’s advanced sensor package. At the core of our sensing capability is our Nortek DVL, a 360 degree 5 camera system, advanced hydrophone array and a Sparton AHRS-8. With the vehicle’s full panoramic vision and advanced localization capabilities the team is finding new and interesting ways to solve the competition’s challenges. With a continuous regimen the team tests the systems every two weeks during the school year and every weekend over the summer. With this robust schedule, and emphasis on education the team is better prepared for RoboSub 2018. We are excited to see you all at the TRANSDEC casino.

University of Florida

SubjuGator

Gainesville, Florida, USA

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SubjuGator is an autonomous underwater vehicle project designed and built by students of the Machine Intelligence Laboratory (MIL) at the University of Florida (UF). The University of Florida has participated in every RoboSub competition since its incarnation in 1998. The SubjuGator team is comprised of undergraduate and graduate students of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and the Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering.

University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

Illinois AUV

Urbana, Illinois, USA

Illinois AUV is a student-run organization with an aim to build an autonomous underwater vehicle to compete at the international RoboSub competition organized by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI). Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) have enormous value in the industry, as vessels for exploration of oceans, surveying sea floors for the oil and gas sector, in the military for mine exploration, and in research for monitoring and studying underwater life and thus we think this a worthy goal to pursue. Through this venture, we hope to bring people with different skillsets from diverse backgrounds to pursue a common goal of creating a collaborative learning environment and knowledge base for improving resources to learn and skills relating to Artificial Intelligence and Robotics The team is comprised of driven students from diverse backgrounds and disciplines, who aim to explore the applications of cutting-edge technology and engineering in building an autonomous underwater vehicle. As a team, we aim to develop a platform for the exchange of ideas, fostering team spirit and cultivating a strong work ethic. We are a highly software focused team and specifically geared towards adapting some of the most cutting-edge progress in the fields Machine Learning, Computer Vision, and Robotics. In our mission to further the progress in AUVs, we’re fortunate to have the support and advice of some of the leading researchers in these fields such as Prof. David Forsyth and Prof. Volodymyr Kindratenko..

University of Maryland, Baltimore County

UMBC Robosub

Baltimore, Maryland, USA

We are UMBC Robosub, a subteam in the Retriever Robotics Club, who are building the autonomous underwater systems of the future, today. To fit the multi-disciplinary nature of the project, our team is composed of undergraduates and researchers from the Mechanical, Computer, and Electrical Engineering fields as well as from Computer Science. The system is manufactured entirely in-house and will be able to achieve complete autonomy in a multitude of challenging environments.

University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez

RUMarino

Mayagüez, Puerto Rico

Three years ago RUMarino was created with the purpose of becoming a project developed entirely by undergraduate students of multiple mayors with the passion of learning and developing an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV). Throughout these years and many adversities, such as two hurricanes devastating Puerto Rico in a month and many of the students living without electricity for a long period of time, this team has learned that hard work and dedication is crucial when in comes to developing and managing a product of high complexity. From 15 students, we’ve grown to have a team of more than 40 students whose drive to learn and become leaders in their fields have led them to surpass what was thought possible with the limited budget that the team had at hand. Even after the competition, perseverance has become our strongest belief. We had developed a new design for our AUV but due to certain circumstances it was not possible to have for this competition. RUMarino adapted to the situation, learned from the last competition and modified our last AUV to have a more robust structure, software and team. Last year we were able to obtain the Best New Entry award and the Perseverance award, this year we are working to do a better job to become one of the best teams of the competition.

University of Southern California

USC AUV Design Team

Los Angeles, California, USA

The Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Design Team of the University of Southern California (AUV of USC) is a student-run organization dedicated to the applications and advancement of underwater robotics technologies. Having spent the last year and a half building an entirely new submarine, we are very excited to be returning to the RoboSub competition. We are looking forward to getting our sub in the pool, but are also eager to learn about the multitude of techniques and technologies as we gear up for another sub build in the coming year.

University of Victoria

AUVIC

Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

AUVIC is the University of Victoria’s Autonomous Underwater Vehicle team. Located on Southern Vancouver Island, oceanographic research and marine engineering are very relevant and present at UVic and in Victoria. AUVIC is UVic’s oldest competition team, having been founded in 2002 and is completely comprised of undergraduate students. The team has competed at RoboSub several times in the past, taking second place in 2009. Over the last several years new members have rebuilt the team and have developed an entirely new platform for the competition AUV. AUVIC has been continually expanding the capabilities of their robot and this year the AUV has doubled in size again to accommodate new peripherals and future enhancements. AUVIC also participates in community outreach like teaching soldering to undergraduate engineering students; creating curriculum for teaching marine engineering, electrical engineering, and coding to high school students at the Ocean Networks Canada’s Ocean Science Symposium; and leading presentations and workshops about marine engineering for high school students.

Utah State University

Utah State RoboSub Team

Logan, Utah, USA

The Utah State University Robosub team is an undergraduate engineering team dedicated to creating a new generation autonomous underwater vehicle for the AUVSI Robosub competition. The team is comprised of undergraduate students at Utah State University from various engineering disciplines. With students in the software, electrical, and mechanical teams, members get the chance to get involved in the large range of engineering design challenges that the Robosub competition grants. This is the perfect way for the members to hone their passion for robotics and engineering in more than just their specific discipline.

This years design although similar to last years design is a completely new build. With four years of combined research and development, this year’s vehicle is an improvement on all previous designs. Poseidon is lighter, more durable, and stronger than ever before. The submarine boasts new features such as a completely redesigned electronics stack, dual torpedo launchers, dropper, and a complete redesign of the vision processing system and decision making skills. The improvements to the design allow this years team to tackle more of the competition than we ever have in the past, a testament to the hard work of this year’s members.

Washington State University

Palouse RoboSub

Pullman, Washington, USA

Technical Design Report

California Institute of Technology

CalTech Robotics Team

Pasadena, California, USA

The Caltech Robotics Team is based on the goal of teaching its members valuable skills that will help them in their future careers. To this end the team attacks projects each year that will provide new and interesting challenges to all branches of the team. This year for the first time we are re-using one of our vehicles. Updating a robot for new challenges provided a challenge that we haven’t faced before. Additionally, we are in the process of building a second vehicle. This vehicle is moving away from the domed pressure hulls we have used in the past in order to present a new and unique design challenge to our mechanical team.

Wroclaw University of Science and Technology

PWr Diving Crew

Wroclaw, Poland