Undergrads combine BRAIN power for a robotic submarine competition

Members of Cornell's Big Red Artificial Intelligence Navigator (BRAIN) team, mechanical engineering seniors Dave Sweeney and Kenneth Elser, put a robotic submarine through its paces in Helen Newman Hall pool May 25. Nicola Kountoupes/University Photography

By Mark Siegal '00

Cornell's famous Wilder Brain Collection had a namesake rivalry recently when the Big Red Artificial Intelligence Navigator (BRAIN) team demonstrated its small robotic submarines on campus. The student team was preparing for the 2000 Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition to be held July 7-10 at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla.

The team, made up of 43 mostly undergraduate engineering majors, was founded last September by four sophomores: computer science majors Walter Chang, Nidhi Kalra and Sergei Vassilvitskii and electrical engineering major Jack Chuang.

"The team started on the heels of RoboCup [the world robot "soccer" competition won by Cornell's Big Red team last year], after seeing their success and looking for a more undergraduate-driven project," said Vassilvitskii.

Split into two groups, called Red Tide and Yellow Sub, the team will send two submarines to the third annual competition in Orlando, sponsored by the Office of Naval Research and the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.

Said Kevin Kornegay, a Cornell electrical engineering professor and the team's adviser: "When the four founding members approached me, I simply could not turn them down. Their level of enthusiasm, their preparation and so forth was very convincing. They gave a very good presentation, so I just signed up early on, without realizing what I was getting myself into. But it's been a wonderful ride so far. This is a great bunch of kids."

For the competition, the submarines must navigate a 150-meter-circumference artificial lake and locate an underwater ring in murky and obstacle-laden conditions. Attached to the ring is a beacon that emits a regular "ping" and a flash of light.

Each team has up to 30 minutes to bring the ring to the surface, with the trophy going to the fastest team. The submarines must weigh less than 100 kilograms and must float without power. A written component describing the project determines in advance the order of the teams.

The Cornell submarine group is student run. "That's something that separates us from most other teams here," said Vassilvitskii. "It's almost 100 percent student driven -- deciding what we want to do, when we set the deadlines and did we follow the deadlines or not."

"We've still maintained the spirit of BRAIN as a single team. So there's friendly competition, which is good," said Kornegay. "We kept them separate in the initial design phases, and then we brought them all together for the actual physical design."

"There's some interteam rivalry but not much competition -- mostly trying to show off," said Chang. "It's the same problem and a lot of the resources are the same. Both teams independently came up with quite a few similar ideas and some very drastic differences."

The team to beat in the national competition is from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which has won the competition in the past two years.

"A major goal has been to beat MIT. We're going to beat them," Chang asserted.

Unlike RoboCup, the BRAIN team currently is not an academic course, although about 15 percent of the members enroll for independent study.

"I would gladly turn this into a course, if given adequate resources," said Kornegay.

The team has received financial support from Raytheon, Ford Motor Co. and Lockheed Martin and the Cornell departments of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.

Funds are being sought for transportation to the competition and lodging, said Kornegay. "We need money," he said.