University Teams Showcase Maritime Autonomy in International Competition
Osaka University’s USV navigates its way through the course during a task. Photo courtesy Northrop Grumman Corp.
After three days of competition at the Float at Marina Bay in Singapore, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-Olin College team won first place in the 2014 AUVSI Foundation Maritime RobotX Challenge.
Fifteen teams from around the globe came to compete in the first ever iteration of the autonomous unmanned surface vehicle competition. Each team had to prepare for the course, where the USVs had to complete a set of tasks, including navigation and control through a marked course, detection and avoidance of obstacles, identifying and reporting on a target, signal identification, and docking and searching for an underwater acoustic source.
A 190-square-meter competition area enclosed two courses, where the teams’ modified five-meter WAM-V USVs could run simultaneously. At the sign of any issues, a judge could activate a kill switch to cease a boat’s operation.
Qualification rounds took three days, beginning on Thursday 23 Oct., and the final round took place on Sunday 26 Oct. The team from KAIST in Korea finished in second; the Queensland University of Technology team took third; and the Embry-Riddle team, after leading in the finals, finished fourth after snagging on an obstacle mooring line.
In addition to the five water events, teams were judged on land-based tasks, including production and maintenance of a team website, a journal paper describing their design, and a design presentation.
The MIT-Olin vessel, Athena-Nike, finished first overall, second in land-based judging and first in the best paper category, leaving with almost $25,000 in winnings.
“Team MIT-Olin is very pleased to have won first place in the very first RobotX maritime challenge,” says Prof. Dave Barrett, team faculty advisor. “This was a very difficult set of races, and it was an honor to be able to compete in an international venue with 15 strong, talented teams from some of the best engineering institutions in the world.”
After the disappointing finals snag and fall to fourth overall, the Embry-Riddle team remained optimistic.
“We will be coming home with $11,000 in prize money, multiple awards, and accolades for good sportsmanship and for assisting other teams, and respect from everyone familiar with the competition,” says Dr. Charles Reinholtz, mechanical engineering department chair at Daytona Beach campus. “I am proud to be associated with this great team and great university.”
Embry-Riddle wasn’t the only team with dramatics as the volatile Singapore weather proved difficult for everyone.
“Every day saw huge hurdles, from equipment and software failures, to working outside in humid 90-degree heat for 12 hours, to making a system of many moving parts come together all at once,” says Mike Benjamin from MIT. “I’m so proud of our team for staying focused and persistent in what were some really tough conditions.”
It was an impressive victory for the MIT-Olin team, whose boat capsized last month, forcing them to replace the entire electrical system.
Unfortunately, not every team made it through the competition as smoothly as the victors.
“It was mostly the heat causing big problems — things were overheating, but you couldn’t have your boxes open for cooling because of possible rain,” says Queensland University of Technology project supervisor Matt Dunabin. “We had one of our boxes open while we were out on the course, and one of these Singapore downpours came and we got water in one part of our electronics, which was almost a showstopper.”
The team from QUT qualified for the sixth and final spot in Sunday’s finals, but last-minute programming changes catapulted them to take the $12,000 third place prize.
“In the morning we did the entire course absolutely brilliantly, but then the wind picked up for the afternoon and everyone got caught out,” says Dunabin.
The QUT vessel, Bruce, will return to the university for further research. “We actually want to see if we can make this type of technology useful for search-and-rescue operations or oil spills,” says Dunabin. “It’s actually big enough that we can do these experiments — for example, try to rescue a person.”
According to the competition website, the goal is “to foster student interest in autonomous robotic systems operating in the maritime domain, with an emphasis on the science and engineering of autonomy.” However, the benefits reach well beyond the week in Singapore.
“The ongoing benefits are going to outweigh, in the long run, the actual competition,” says Dunabin. “There is going to be a lot of potential in these vehicles.”
The event was organized by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, Singapore’s Ministry of Defense and Northrop Grumman Corp.
Event video coverage and full results are available at RobotX.org.
