CU students sink the competition in annual automated submarine contest

Cornell Autonomous Underwater Vehicle team members pose with their 2003 vehicle after its winning run in San Diego, Calif., Aug. 10. They are, back row, from left: Professor Kevin Kornegay, Jason Pagnotta, Bryan Silverthorn, Renaldi Winoto, Sean Welch, Karl Schulze and James Buescher; and front row, from left: David Hinkes, Philip Sieh and Ryan Stenson. CU AUV team

By Bill Steele

A Cornell student team has won the sixth annual Autonomous Underwater Vehicle competition, held Aug. 7-10 in San Diego, Calif.

The Cornell mini-submarine demonstrated fully autonomous behavior better than any other in the competition, according to team captain James Buescher, who graduated from Cornell this year.

But it wasn't all smooth sailing. With just minutes to go in the competition, the Cornell team completed repairs and modifications to the 2-meter-long mini-sub, enabling it to navigate a predetermined course under computer control. Along with bragging rights, the team brought home a $7,000 prize.

The contest is sponsored by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International and the U.S. Office of Naval Research. The competition changes annually, and this year's task was to navigate in a straight line through an underwater gate to a spot where three arrows were displayed on the bottom of the pool, determine which of the arrows was lighted and follow that arrow to a target on which to drop markers.

The Cornell team built a robust, modular vehicle in which the propulsion system is completely separate from the payload so that it could be used for any sort of task. This year, a down-pointing video camera and vision-processing module were mounted in the payload space. In the initial phase of judging, in which judges examine the craft itself, read a technical paper describing the craft and evaluate the team's Web site, Cornell was ranked first out of 12 qualifying teams. In terms of hardware and software, Cornell's sub was "the most advanced platform on site," Buescher said.

But the vision-processing component was another story. Practicing in Teagle and Helen Newman pools at Cornell, the team lacked space to test the entire process from beginning to end. And when the students arrived in San Diego, they found that the competition pool had cloudier water than Cornell's swimming pools and bright sunlight changed the look of the markers on the pool bottom. "We went back to our lab facility [the team's hotel room] and completely reworked our vision code," Buescher said. "It took two days of practice time to get back to where we were."

The day of the finals dawned cloudy and the Cornell team opted for the last time slot, hoping for the sunshine their vision system now expected. The late hour proved lucky, because a problem developed with the propulsion system. The team feverishly swapped components, getting the sub ready to run barely 15 minutes before the run.

The sub headed straight to the arrows, locked onto the correct course and proceeded toward the target. "It was just beautiful to watch; it was flawless," said Kevin Kornegay, Cornell associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and faculty adviser to the team.

Well, almost flawless. The sub ended up just a couple of feet left, but that was more than enough, because no other team had done that well. Even the Massachusetts Institute of Technology team had trouble making it through the first gate.

Representatives from several companies who had come to observe the competition expressed interest in Cornell's design, Buescher said. "They hung out in our tent a lot," he reported.

Other team members are Bryan Silverthorn '05, Alex Shih '05, Josh Fishman '05, David Hinkes '04, Ryan Stenson '04, Scott Weeks '04, Philip Sieh '03, Jason Pagnotta '03, Karl Schulze '06, Renaldi Winoto '03, Michael Stanish '05, Jackie Romero '05, and graduate students Sean Welch and Vikash Goel.

The Cornell team is sponsored by Shell, SolidWorks, Tritech International Limited, Wintress Engineering Corp., Texas Instruments, Sax.net and Technoland. Also, Kornegay said, "This would not have been possible without support from the university, particularly Provost Biddy Martin, the Schools of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Computer Science." He also thanked Kent Fuchs, dean of the College of Engineering, who attended the competition.