“The 2010 International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition took place last week, and the very first thing that happened was that everybody decided that they’d much rather spend their time building robot subs as opposed to gasping out the name of the competition, so it’s now just called “RoboSub.” These RoboSubs are autonomous (not remote controlled), so the competition operates kinda like the DARPA Grand or Urban Challenge: you push the go button, and then your robot is on its own, and you can do nothing but sit back and have an anxiety attack.
As you can see from the vid, the bots have a lot of fairly complicated tasks to perform, and I imagine that being underwater causes a whole host of sensor issues… For example, several tasks require the robots to differentiate colored objects, and colors change underwater depending on depth as the red light gets filtered out. Not to mention the whole water not mixing with electronics thing…”
