CU team wins 2nd place in world competition for small automated subs

Big Red Artificial Intelligence Navigator (BRAIN) team member James Buescher, right, assists U.S. Navy divers in lowering the Cornell submarine into the water at the International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition at Lago Dorado near Orlando, Fla. Courtesy of the BRAIN team

The Cornell Big Red Artificial Intelligence Navigator (BRAIN) team won second place at the third annual International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition held July 7-10 at Lago Dorado, on the grounds of Disney's Coronado Springs resort near Orlando, Fla. Cornell's submarine took first place in the Safety of Design, Technical Merit and Craftsmanship categories, and tied for second place overall with the competition favorite and two-time defending winner, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). First place overall went to the University of Rhode Island.

Started by sophomores Serguei Vassilvitskii, Nidhi Kalra and Walter Chang in September of 1999, and advised by Kevin Kornegay, assistant professor of electrical engineering, the BRAIN team consisted of 42 students from the departments of computer science, electrical engineering, mechanical and aerospace engineering, applied and engineering physics, and operations research and industrial engineering, and from the College of Arts and Sciences.

"I'm very proud of these kids, and I do hope people appreciate the magnitude of their accomplishment," said Kornegay, noting that the Cornell team was composed almost entirely of undergraduates, while other teams, notably MIT's, were mostly graduate students. Also, he said, Rhode Island, MIT and several other schools in the competition have programs in oceanography that make regular use of automated vehicles to retrieve samples. "Under the circumstances and with all the odds against us, we prevailed," he said.

The competition, sponsored by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI), is in its third year and is rapidly growing, with 12 teams entering in 2000. This was the first time a Cornell team had entered.

This goal of this year's competition was to locate and retrieve an orange ring 12 inches in diameter from a murky lake, 350 feet across. A flashing light and an acoustic pinger were placed next to the target and served as navigational guides to the ring. In addition to finding and retrieving the ring, the sub had to record the ping and flash rates of the beacons. The challenge was to perform the task completely autonomously, without any communication between the submarine and any person or computer on shore once the vessel entered the water.

Cornell's sub contained sound and vision sensors, an inertial navigation system, pressure sensors and a digital compass, all feeding information to an artificial intelligence (AI) program running under Linux on an AMD K-6 microprocessor. The system uses passive sonar to find the pinger. When the sub arrives, the system switches to vision. It must identify the ring, pick it up using hooks attached to the outside of the vehicle, then surface without dropping it. Cornell earned extra points in preliminary judging for a system that verifies that the sub has actually locked onto an object before giving the order to surface.

The competition is judged first on a technical paper describing the design, then an examination of the sub by judges and finally the retrieval task. The Cornell team overcame last-minute technical difficulties, partially stemming from central Florida's extreme heat and humidity, to complete a fully autonomous run. The judges awarded Cornell's vehicle first place in static judging for craftsmanship, technical merit and safety of design, but the autonomous run pushed Cornell into a tie for second place with two-time winner MIT, while both teams were edged out by Rhode Island.

"This has been an incredible trip," said Cornell team captain Vassilvitskii. "What we have learned surpasses anything that could have been taught to us in the classroom. A lot of the professors have been incredible, and Kevin himself has been very helpful in giving us support and getting us resources from the university. Beyond that there are dozens of others to thank, too many to list."

"We are already considering improvements to this year's design, and we hope to position ourselves to win next year," added team member Brian Dunstan.

Unlike the highly successful Cornell RoboCup robotic soccer team, the BRAIN effort 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 some financial support from Raytheon, Ford Motor Co. and Lockheed Martin and the Cornell departments of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, but Kornegay said much more is needed. Nevertheless, he said, "Next year's outlook is fantastic for us."