The Duke Robotics Club has taken on the national challenge to come up with innovations that will eventually reduce war-related casualties by creating robots that can perform military roles that humans now have to do.
This year the team built Charybdis, its autonomous underwater vehicle, for the annual Association for Underwater Vehicle Systems International Competition in San Diego, Calif. Charybdis was named for the Greek monster that formed a whirlpool by pulling water down and spurting it out of the bottom.
“We wanted to say that it was tougher than the other robots,” senior team member John Felkins said.
Bright blue in color and resembling a flying saucer, Charybdis moves through the water with two thrusters and a propeller. Duke’s robot features both a forward-facing camera and a downward-facing camera, an altimeter to measure distance from the bottom of the tank, a pressure gauge and a sonar system to calculate velocity.
Charybdis took fifth place out of 18 teams and won $1,000 for being the most innovative vehicle in the competition. The team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology took first place.
This year’s competition featured three tasks. All vehicles were required to navigate themselves, locate and move through a specific gate, drop markers in underwater bins and surface within a marked zone. These movements resemble the field operations that a real autonomous underwater vehicle might actually perform.
In the practice round of the competition, Charybdis performed with few errors, giving the team a good chance at a second-place prize. During the final round, however, the cameras failed and the vehicle was unable to see the marked bins. Despite the malfunction, Charybdis still came within four feet of the designated surface zone.
The team remains excited about its showing and is already making plans for next year, eager to improve its performance and maintain Duke’s status as a “strong school” at the prominent competition.
“We had some flaws, but we are going to try to work them out,” Felkins said.
The team’s goal for next year’s competition is to increase the vehicle’s reliability and speed. Charybdis’ flying saucer design makes it more maneuverable, yet slower in the water. “MIT’s robot was much faster than ours,” Felkins said. “We want to speed up to be more competitive.”
The competition also gives the team members opportunities to apply engineering principles to real-life situations and obtain hands-on experience.
“It teaches you a lot about technology and shows you how the theories really work,” said senior Andy Smith, who noted that representatives from engineering firms attend the competition in order to seek out future employees. “A lot of companies indicated that they were particularly interested in competition participants because we have experiences that no other new hire will have.”
Tyler Helble, Pratt ’04, took advantage of the opportunity to network with interested companies. Because of his work on Charybdis, he received a job offer from the competition’s organizer, the U.S. Navy’s Space and Naval Systems Command.
The presence of robotics industry representatives was of particular help to senior Josh Johnston. “I learned so much from talking to other teams and even got to bounce some ideas for next year off the experts in the field,” he said.
Field representatives were impressed by Charybdis’ originality, and Duke team members noted that experts can sometimes learn from the competing teams.
“We really get to think outside the box because we haven’t been conditioned to believe that certain things won’t work,” Johnston said. “It’s a good and bad thing.”
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