Thales Sponsors Caltech Engineers in AUV Contest

Thales is supporting the next generation of engineers with its sponsorship of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) Robotics team’s entry into the 17th Annual International RoboSub competition.

The event, cosponsored by the Association for Unmanned Systems International (AUVSI) Foundation and the Office of Naval Research, aims to advance the development of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV) by challenging new engineers to perform realistic missions in an underwater environment. The event also serves to foster ties between young engineers and the organizations developing AUV technologies. The Caltech team, which is made up of 30 undergraduates from 10 different majors, is working on the cutting edge of unmanned systems.

The underwater unmanned vehicle, which has been affectionately name Bruce, features a custom designed pressure hull with two stereoscopic cameras, a custom serial protocol and back-plane, plugand- play battery packs, and a custom shared memory system.

During the competition, “Bruce” will have to complete a punishing underwater obstacle course completely autonomously while performing such tasks as:

• Identifying and ramming a correctly colored buoy
• Shooting a torpedo through the correct cutout
• Locating a SONAR pinger
• Turning a wheel and pulling a lever
• Passing over a bar at a specified depth

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