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Third overall, and first among teams that built their vehicle from scratch this year.
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The student autonomous underwater vehicle team finished third overall at a regional competition in June, and first among entries built from scratch during the same academic year.
The team credits the test basin, which opened in January. Previous years' vehicles were tested in a swimming pool with no wave capability, or not tested at all until the competition itself.
"We broke two vehicles in the basin between February and April," said Samuel Hartley, who supervises the team. "That sounds bad and it is the reason they placed. Every one of those failures was a thing that would have happened in the competition tank instead."
The vehicle completed the navigation and object identification tasks and lost points on a manipulator task that the team had run out of time to refine. Priya Iyer, who chairs the department, noted that the decision to leave the manipulator underdeveloped rather than compromise the navigation system was itself the right engineering judgment.
The team is open to students from any year and any program. Its current membership includes two first-year students, one of whom joined in September having never built anything.
Work on next year's vehicle starts in September.
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