Young people from five countries – the U.S., Singapore, Australia, Japan, and South Korea – will take part in a competition this fall to develop the most sophisticated advances in robotics. The Office of Naval Research (ONR), the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI), and the Singapore Ministry of Defence are sponsoring the competition, in which three teams from each country ultimately will win 100,000 in prize money. The ONR role in the Pacific-based Maritime RobotX competition will focus on the teams’ abilities to complete a series of tasks relating to navigation and control, obstacle detection and avoidance, docking and target identification, underwater search for an acoustic source, and observation, identification and reporting of a specified target. Each team will use an unpowered version of a 16-foot unmanned watercraft called the Wave Adaptive Modular Vessel. The teams each also will be given money to construct battery-powered propulsion systems and sensors.
