Tachyon, CUAUV's 2010 vehicle, is coming along nicely. We expect to have our first full vehicle control test on April 4. Below is a rendering of the vehicle's mechanical structure without shrouding.

CUAUV held its first pool test of our spring semester on Sunday, January 24. We tested all Nova systems to make sure everything was working, and took pictures of some new mission props: the 2x2 window we hope will be in the 2010 competition mission as a torpedo launching task.

CUAUV has voted to name its 2010 competition vehicle Tachyon. Tachyon is a theoretical "sub"-atomic particle that travels faster than the speed of light.

CUAUV is pleased to announce that MicroStrain will sponsor our team for 2009-2010! MicroStrain has generously donated a new 3DM-GX1 sensor. This sensor will allow our new vehicle to output its orientation better in dynamic and static environments.

On Saturday, October 17 CUAUV hosted a Balloon-Powered Boats Challenge for high school students participating in the Diversity Programs in Engineering (DPE) Prospective Candidates' Weekend. Students were split into groups of two and collaborated with CUAUV team members to create a balloon-propelled paper boat. To promote creativity and innovation, students were given limited time and resouces consisting of only one sheet of newspaper, an arms length of tape, a zip tie, one straw, and one balloon. The high school students enjoyed working in CUAUV's lab workspace. They had the opportunity to learn about the team and pose questions about Cornell Engineering as a whole.

On October 4, CUAUV ran its third Macrophyte growth survey in the Southwest end of Cayuga lake off of the Cayuga Lake Floating Classroom boat the Haendel. Nova ran a long transect to determine the deepest depth of plant growth, then was taken back onto the boat to take pictures of the lakesource cooling outflow diffuser.

Robotic Submarine Running Debian Wins International Competition

This August, a team of 35 undergraduate students from Cornell University sank the competition at the 12th annual Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition^[0], sponsored by the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International and the Office of Naval Research. The competition takesplace in a large acoustic testing pool operated by the US Navy SPAWAR Systems Center. It calls for entries to pass through a gate, follow a path, ram a submerged buoy, fire through a square target with small torpedoes, drop markers into bins containing simulated targets, recover a PVC target and surface through an octagon shape, all without human intervention. The Cornell Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Team (CUAUV)^[1] took first place by completing the entire course at the competition, a feat not seen since MIT won in 2002. This was Cornell's first victory since 2003.

Cornell's vehicle, named "Nova," runs a custom software stack on top of a single board computer running Linux and relies heavily on Debian. "Debian works amazingly well for us," said Benjamin Seidenberg, CUAUV's new software team leader. "Not only do we use it on the vehicle, we also run it on the computers in our lab and our servers, and use it to develop our custom electronics." Seidenberg, who also handles IT issues for the team, said that they consolidated on Debian three years ago. "When I joined the team, we had computers running Windows XP, Windows Server, Debian, Ubuntu, FreeBSD and Gentoo. Now we've settled on Debian for the sub and the servers; our lab workstations dual boot Debian and Windows. It's a lot easier to manage, and it's great to be able to develop in the same environment that the submarine runs."

The team also uses other open source software on their vehicle such as OpenCV for image processing and libdc1394 for video capture. According to Arseney Romanenko, another member of the software team, these libraries are essential for doing vision processing in an embedded environment; they are fast and lightweight which translates into significant power savings.

[0] http://auvsi.org/competitions/water.cfm
[1] http://www.cuauv.org

More information about Debian and CUAUV, along with the full press release can be found here.

CUAUV recruited about 20 new members for the team. Pictured below are some of the new members at the first team social (ultimate frisbee on the arts quad). Congratulations to all the new members! Check back shortly for updated team profile information.

Due to scheduling conflicts, the Sunday (Sept. 6) Recruitment Information Session has been moved from RPCC 205 (Auditorium) to Appel 303A. The time of the session will remain from 3:30-5:30pm. See you there!

Are you interested in building a robotic submarine? Do you want to get involved in a hands-on engineering project? Then you should consider joining CUAUV! The team will be hosting recruitment info sessions during the first full week of classes. Dates, times, and locations are posted on the Recruitment Page