Widener Robotics Engineering Team Competes in International Robosub Competition

A robotics engineering team from Widener University's School of Engineering competed in RoboSub 2024 this summer in Irvine, California. RoboSub is an international competition that invites high school and college participants to tackle simplified versions of challenges facing the underwater maritime industry. As the team's first time participating the Robosub competition, they qualified for the semifinals and built one of the lightest subs in the competition.

The team of undergraduate and graduate students, with guidance from one faculty advisor and one industry advisor, competed using an autonomous underwater vehicle, or AUV, that they built during the 2023-2024 academic year. The AUV was equipped with an underwater gripper and a vectorized thruster configuration, which enabled the vehicle to change its angle of thrust and movement. Multiple onboard sensors were integrated to the AUV to support navigation, underwater objects detection and recognition, and acoustic signal acquisition. Additionally, two onboard microprocessors were used to process sensor data, fuse information from different sensors, and make AUV operation decisions. The team developed software to implement all data processing and decision-making tasks using Robot Operating System and Python.