[U-Texas] Students Place 2nd in Robotic Sub Competition

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http://www.utdallas.edu/news/2008/08/11-002.php

Students Place 2nd in Robotic Submarine Competition
11th-Hour Changes Help Propel Team to Top Ranks in Underwater Challenge
Aug. 11, 2008

Students from the University of Texas at Dallas surged from their 14th-seed position in this year’s 11th annual International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition to not only take second place but very nearly capture first, coming in well ahead of teams from powerhouse engineering schools such as Georgia Tech, USC and Cornell.

“I think it’s safe to say that UTD has arrived as a team that will be a serious contender for top honors from here forward,” said Dr. Ed Esposito, an assistant dean in UTD’s Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science, and the team’s faculty sponsor.

UTD’s dark-horse team finished so close behind the winners from the University of Maryland in this year’s 11th annual competition that the judges awarded the team a $1,000 bonus on top of the second-place award of $4,000.

The UTD team’s secret weapon was their sonar system, which is the most important component for enabling the small submarines to perform point-garnering tasks in the course set out for them in a 6-million-gallon pool at San Diego’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center.

“The team’s plan going into the competition was to make sure the sonar worked at all costs,” said Chris Thomas, the team’s faculty mentor and a senior systems engineer at Raytheon Co. “We traveled to San Diego with a sonar that had been tested for over a month, during which the team identified and corrected problems. A lot of hard work and long nights went into that.”

After arriving in San Diego, though, and seeing just how well the sonar system worked during trial runs, the team’s ambitions grew]david.moore1@utdallas.edu[/url]
or the Office of Media Relations, UT Dallas, (972) 883-2155, newscenter@utdallas.edu

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SMU Robotics Club places 14th in national competition

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The SMU Robotics Club placed 14th out 25 teams over the weekend in the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition in San Diego.

“We had a string of problems that all stemmed from our first test,” said Nathan Huntoon, a team member. “We had to spend all day scrambling to get everything back together.”

Last year, the club placed 11th out of 28 teams after their submarine was stolen by thieves out of the backseat of a student's car just days before the competition. The team worked feverishly to rebuild the submarine after police recovered it.

This year, it was quite the opposite.

The team spent weeks building a new model of the submarine and had no troubles before they went to the competition, but they ran into flooding and software problems once the contest began.

“We had a bug,” Mr. Huntoon said. “The bug came back and bit us. If we had noticed it, we probably would have gotten fourth. It was a pretty rough week for us.”

The University of Texas at Dallas placed 2nd in the competition.