Cornell student team takes second place in submarine contest

Cornell's miniature submarine gets a weight check before making its final run to capture second place at the International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle competition, July 28 to Aug. 1 in San Diego. From left, competition technical director David Novick; team leader Ryan Stenson '04, a Cornell master of engineering student; Doug Todoroff, U.S. Office of Naval Research, a judge; and head diver Kirk Pile. Richard King

A Cornell student team placed second in the seventh annual International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle competition, held July 28 to Aug. 1 in San Diego. The team brought home a prize of $5,000.

The Cornell team, which won last year's competition, was edged out this year by the team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A total of 18 teams competed, seven for the first time.

The Cornell second-place finish was considered remarkable because the team was made up of first-time competitors who completely rebuilt the 2-meter-long mini- submarine's control electronics just prior to the competition. That was necessary because this year's competition demanded more advanced vision processing requiring very fine-grain vehicle control.

The contest is sponsored by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International and the U.S. Office of Naval Research. The competition changes annually. This year's task for the submarines was to navigate a bank of drop boxes with a vertical LED post at the far end, set on an incline. Dropping markers into bins earned points according to the bin location. After dropping two markers, the subs then followed the tones generated by audio pingers to the recovery zone, where they surfaced.

Kevin Kornegay, Cornell associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, was the team's faculty adviser. The team leader was Ryan Stenson '04, a graduate student in engineering. Other team members were Rives Borland, Eli Brown, Shawn Chen, Ben Evans, Vikash Goel, David Hinkes, Jayant Kulkarni, James Buescher, Bryan Silverthorn, Mike Stanish, Chris Caufield, Chad Dize, Marcelo Garza, Adrian Lai, Dominick Mancuso, Wei Min Chan, Dennis Leung, Onimisi Ojeba, Sheng Wuey Ong, Jason Pagnotta, Neil Radia, Matt Robins, Phillip Sieh and Ian Wang. Sponsors of the Cornell team included Shell, Seacon, NetBurner, Prizm, Samtec, Cortland Cable and Positronic Industries.