Engineering Students to Compete in International Maritime Robot Competition

For the past three months, a team of engineering students at UC San Diego has been adding cameras, LiDAR systems, a hydrophone, and even a drone to a 16-foot seagoing vessel. Their goal? To compete in the Maritime RobotX Challenge in Australia in November 2022. In order to get there, they'll have to turn the vessel into a completely autonomous system, capable of navigating to specific buoys, launching objects at a target, and working with a drone to map out the sea space, entirely on its own. They are under no illusions: it's a difficult task. But it's a welcomed challenge that, for several of the students, has been more than 10 years in the making, thanks to the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) robotics outreach program, and RoboNation, the nonprofit organization behind RobotX. "Way back in third grade, our FIRST Robotics coach wanted us to work toward underwater robotics; we started with land vehicles for the first eight years, then transitioned to underwater vehicles, initially with an 18-inch cubed underwater submersible for the RoboSub competition. The next progression of RoboSub is RobotX, which is the university-level competition, and we're finally getting to participate this year," said Colin Szeto, a first-year mechanical engineering student at the Jacobs School of Engineering.