UF Robotic Submarine's Mission In Competition: To Recover 'Black Box'

June 29, 2000

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — When an airliner goes down in the ocean, divers often work days or weeks in dangerous conditions to find the “black box” that could reveal what went wrong.

Now, a team of University of Florida engineering students are designing a robotic submarine aimed at eliminating the danger and reducing the search to a matter of hours.

The submarine is not intended to find voice and data recorders from real crashes — not yet anyway. Rather, this “Subjugator” is UF’s entry in the third International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition, set for July 7-9 at Disney’s Coronado Springs Resort in Orlando. The object of the competition is for the subs, which are neither manned nor remote controlled, to find and retrieve a simulated black box from a small lake.

“It’s a pretty challenging task,” said Scott Nichols, a master’s student in electrical and computer engineering from Miami and one of five graduate students on the UF team. “I feel good about our chances, although at this point we are incredibly crunched for time.”

UF came in second behind the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in last year’s competition, which required contestants’ subs to negotiate a series of underwater gates. For this year’s event — the largest so far with 13 participating teams from around the world — the UF team is building an all new Subjugator. When completed, the cylindrical aluminum submarine will move through the water powered by six small battery-operated trolling motors. Electronic controls and the power plant, which includes four batteries for the motors and one battery for the controls, are mounted inside the sub’s watertight body.

The competition awards the most points to teams whose submarines retrieve a hoop from a beacon in Disney’s Lago Dorado, a lake about two football fields long and up to 11 feet deep. The beacon emits a “ping” and has a strobe light, but its location is otherwise unknown to the participants. Points also are awarded to teams whose submarines perform maneuvers and/or measure the rate of the ping and strobe light.

Devoting 70 hours or more each to week to the project, the UF students are working simultaneously on the submarine’s body, electronics and propulsion systems. The sub will use three hydrophones to listen to the beacon underwater as well as a light sensor to watch for the strobe. The brains of the sub, an onboard computer and hard drive, then will translate the signals into navigational cues and direct the sub to the beacon. Placed in six positions on the body, the motors allow the craft to move in any direction, meaning that it does not have to change its orientation as it travels.

The technical challenges are numerous. For starters, the students had to build and program the onboard computer system, which has a Pentium processor and uses the Linux operating system. They also must ensure the sub’s sensors operate seamlessly with the computer and propulsion systems, and they must develop a mechanism to grasp the hoop.

Team members receive independent study credit for the sub project, but that’s not their primary motivation. For one thing, they say, the project provides hands-on experience in a range of mechanical, computer and electrical engineering areas of expertise.

“Most of our classes are not hands-on, and the material is usually limited to one particular area,” said Ivan Zapata, a master’s student in electrical and computer engineering from Palm Beach Gardens. “With this project, we’re designing an entire vehicle. We’re each responsible for specific parts, but we have to know what’s going on in the entire system.”

The project also requires participants to innovate, other students said. “You face problems and you have to figure them out and fix them yourself,” Nichols said.

The Subjugator project is sponsored by the Harris Corp., the UF College of Engineering and the department of electrical and computer engineering. Harris donated $10,000, while the engineering college and electrical engineering department each donated $3,000. The team also used $3,000 in prize money it received from last year’s competition.

The other UF team members are Patrick O’Malley, from Chicago, and Jenny Laine, from Gainesville, both master’s students in electrical and computer engineering; and David Novick, a doctoral student in mechanical engineering from Hollywood, Fla. The team’s faculty advisor is Tony Arroyo, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering.