Students participate in international RoboSub competition

A team of Washington State University students has built an autonomous submarine and qualified for the semi-finals in the upcoming RoboNation RoboSub competition set for July 11-16 in Irvine, California.

WSU's Palouse RoboSub club has been working for more than a year to design and build their submarine, called Guppy. To qualify for the semi-finals and bypass the qualifying rounds at the competition, the submarine had to autonomously navigate a gate in Gibb Pool, move forward 10 meters, and turn around a pole before heading back through a gate.

"This marks a major milestone for the club and showcases our advanced robotics capabilities," said Cole Wilson, president of the club and an incoming junior in computer science.

RoboSub is an international competition that invites participants to tackle a version of the challenges facing the underwater maritime industry, such as oceanographic exploration and mapping, detection and manipulation of objects, and pipeline identification and tracking. While the student teams tackle challenges, they also gain hands-on experience and engineering skills in developing, documenting, testing, and managing state-of-the-art systems, according to the competition website.

In addition to participating in an autonomy challenge, students have to document and present their designs as part of the competition. Last year's event included nearly 60 schools from around the world, including from Turkey, Singapore, and India.

The WSU club, which includes nearly 40 undergraduates in engineering and computer science, has been revamped after having last competed in the competition in 2018.

Three students, including Wilson, Brady Hogg, and Natalie Massarenti, had all done robotics in high school, so when they came to WSU as first-year students in fall of 2024, they became interested in the club. Allison Kim joined the trio as officers, restructuring the club, and entering the Robosub competition.

"We're a very new team, and we don't really know what to expect for how we'll do, but our minimum goal was to do that pre-qualification," said Wilson.

Going to the competition provides a unique opportunity in a fast-growing field of autonomous robotics, says Kim.

"No matter what happens at the competition, it will be a great learning experience," she said. "We're really happy with how far we've gotten."

The students started the submarine's design with computer-aided design and preliminary mechanical design. Then, they moved on to assembling and wiring with custom circuitry, creating custom circuit boards and manufacturing them. Guppy's end caps and base plate were all assembled and machined in-house, and the students wrote much of the autonomous computer code from scratch. In the process, they learned about machine learning, object detection, computer vision, and path planning. The submarine is able to move and rotate in all directions.

They also had to learn about electronics and robotics under water, making sure that everything was properly sealed. On the computer science side of things, they learned how to use a robotic operating system framework.

"I really like that we got to start fresh and come up with everything from scratch," said Wilson. "Last year, we had no idea what it would look like, and then this year we have a full submarine. It's really rewarding to see how far we've come. To learn all that in the span of a couple months and to catch up with all these established teams was difficult. There were a lot of really late nights when we were there until 3 a.m."

The students only had seven hours in the swimming pool during finals week to try to meet the qualifying requirement.

"It was a very, very tight timeline to get it all done, but we did it," said Wilson.

Because they qualified for the semi-finals automatically, they can spend the first two days of competition practicing in the competition pool.

"That was really beneficial for us and was one of our main goals for this year," he added.

A total of 16 students will travel to the competition, which is a considered a large number.

"We have no idea how far we're going to get, but this is a really great opportunity," Wilson said. "It will be really rewarding to see all of our work pay off - regardless of scoring or points. Being able to be there, to see and talk to the other teams, and see how they do things will provide motivation for next year. We're really excited for what's to come for the team."