Bales, J. W., & Novick, D. (2011, June), Designing an AUV Competition to Draw Engineering Students Towards Ocean Engineering  Paper presented at 2011 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Vancouver, BC. 10.18260/1-2--17721

\bibitem{asee_peer_17721}
  Bales, J. W., \& Novick, D. (2011, June), \emph{Designing an AUV Competition to Draw Engineering Students Towards Ocean Engineering}
  Paper presented at 2011 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition, Vancouver, BC.
  10.18260/1-2--17721

James W. Bales and David Novick.  "Designing an AUV Competition to Draw Engineering Students Towards Ocean Engineering".  2011 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Vancouver, BC, 2011, June.  ASEE Conferences, 2011.  https://peer.asee.org/17721 Internet.  24 Apr, 2024

\bibitem{asee_peer_17721}
  James W. Bales and David Novick.
  "Designing an AUV Competition to Draw Engineering Students Towards Ocean Engineering".
  \emph{2011 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition, Vancouver, BC, 2011, June}.
  ASEE Conferences, 2011.
  https://peer.asee.org/17721 Internet.  24 Apr, 2024

@INPROCEEDINGS{asee_peer_17721
author = "James W. Bales and David Novick"
title = "Designing an AUV Competition to Draw Engineering Students Towards Ocean Engineering"
booktitle = "2011 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition"
year = "2011"
month = "June"
address = "Vancouver, BC"
publisher = "ASEE Conferences"
note = {https://peer.asee.org/17721}
number = {10.18260/1-2--17721}
}

TY  - CPAPER
AB  -     Designing an AUV Competition to Draw Engineering Students Towards Ocean Engineering            James W. Bales (MIT) and David K. Novick (Sandia National Laboratory)The First International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) Competition took place in thesummer of 1998, under the sponsorship of the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and theAssociation for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International. The competition has been held everysummer since then, and the fourteenth iteration (AUVSI Foundation & ONR's 14th InternationalRoboSub Competition) will take place in July, 2011, at the U.S. Navy’s SSC PacificTRANSDEC Facility in San Diego, CA. The goals of the competition is to provide opportunitiesfor students to experience the challenges of system engineering, to develop skill inaccomplishing realistic missions with autonomous vehicles, and to foster relationships betweenyoung engineers and the organizations developing and producing autonomous systems. In this paper we describe the evolution of the design of the competition itself over the years,highlighting the common features that have been retained as advancing the goals of the event,and noting features that have been discarded. Throughout the years, the design has focused onthe following critical needs:    • The competition has to interest and engage today’s students, and do so against the myriad        other activities and opportunities at their disposal    • The task must provide a reasonably open design space so that there is no obviously right        solution to the challenge    • The task must require teams to address some of the real challenges faced in the marine        environment, scaled to their skill level    • The organizers must create a social environment that simultaneously nourishes        community building between teams, yet promotes the competitive spirit that helps        motivate the teams and adds to the overall fun and excitement    • The scoring structure must provided tiered goals, so that even a novice team, with zero        experience in marine robotics, can experience the success of achieving the initial goals.        Roughly, those tiers are:            o Can the vehicle submerge and follow a desired trajectory?            o Can the vehicle carry out a pre-programmed task?            o Can the vehicle sense its environment through one or more sensing modalities and                return some information about that environment to its operators?            o Can the vehicle sense its environment through one or more sensing modalities                and, based on its sensory inputs, interact with its environment?    • The competition itself must be visually interesting and exciting for the teams, onlookers,        and the press.There is a dynamic tension in trying to simultaneously satisfy all of these constraints, as we willillustrate through the evolution of the competition over the years. We found that one of thecritical elements of success was locating a competition site that had the following characteristics.The competition requires a relatively large, generally shallow, body of water with good visibility,flat space around for team work tents that are on site for several days of practice runs, reasonableaccess to amenities, and open for the general public for the competition itself. Once the site ispicked, then the competition rules can be designed to work within the constraints of the site.Contact:James W. Bales, Ph.D.Assistant Director and InstructorMIT Edgerton Center, Room 4-40677 Massachusetts AvenueCambridge, MA 02139(617) 253-6178 (V)(617) 253-1535 (F)bales@mit.eduhttp://web.mit.edu/edgerton
AU  - James W. Bales
AU  - David Novick
CY  - Vancouver, BC
DA  - 2011/06/26
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  - Designing an AUV Competition to Draw Engineering Students Towards Ocean Engineering
UR  - https://peer.asee.org/17721
DO  - 10.18260/1-2--17721
ER  -