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July 27, 2007, 02:53 PM ET
U. of Florida Wins Robot-Submarine Contest
The Gators are on a roll. Not only did the University of Florida notch national championships in football and basketball this year, but now its students have continued their winning ways in aquatic robots.
This month in San Diego, for the third year in a row, Florida won the International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition. That’s a fancy term for self-contained, self-controlled robot submarines. (The contest is co-sponsored by the federal Office of Naval Research, which would like to send machines rather than people on research, battle, and reconnaissance missions.)
Florida engineering students beat 27 other teams—including one from the U.S. Naval Academy, which should know something about subs—with their entry, “SubjuGator.”
The student-designed vehicles had to navigate—without prompts from their operators—a course that included squeezing through an underwater gate, releasing a buoy, traveling through a pipeline, dropping a series of markers, and retrieving a chest of sunken “treasure.” Then the subs had to surface at a specific target.
SubjuGator looks rather like a single scuba tank sandwiched between two metal brackets. It boasts sensors that include cameras, hydrophones, a compass, an altimeter, and current-feedback detectors.
The contest already has Boeing and Lockheed Martin as sponsors, but with a streak like this, Florida might be getting bathing-suit and swim-fin endorsement offers.—Josh Fischman
Categories: Gadgets
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