Machine Intelligence Laboratory

  • 4pm (PST) on Sunday, 15 July: We won!!
  • 12:23pm (PST) on Sunday, 15 July: At the end of the preliminaries, we are in first place! Our final run will be at 3:30pm (PST). We will be the last team in the water. UCF is in second place. Go Gators! Below are some pictures from taken today.
  • 11:44am (PST) on Sunday, 15 July: At the end of the preliminaries, we are (unofficially) in first place! We were the only team to pick up the treasure chest during competition. But we are having several problems that we are still working on. We have not yet successfully run the full course; we hope the first time is in a few hours in the finals. Pray for us!
  • 5pm (PST) on Saturday, 14 July: We just had our second run and now have the top two scores so far. We went through the gate, we docked with the docking station, we followed some pipe, we found the treasure chest, grabbed it, and surfaced in the center of the recovery zone. We did not drop our markers due to an error in our search algorithm. We are confident that we can fix this problem before the finals tomorrow. The finals will start at around 1pm. Below are some pictures from yesterday, including the up-to-date rankings.

  • 11:45am (PST) on Saturday, 14 July: We just had our first run and likely made the finals. We found the treasure chest, grabbed it, and surfaced in the center of the recovery zone.
  • 11:59pm (PST) on Friday, 14 July: Yesterday the results for the preliminaries (paper, web site, oral presentation, static judging, and uniforms) were anounced. We are presently in third place, behind Cornell and ETS.

    We chose two preliminary trials time today, one at 10am and the other at 4:20pm (PST). We all got plenty of sleep last night and are ready to put on a show. Yesterday we proved to ourselves that we could complete every individual task of the mission; but due to problems with the course (that will be corrected for the trials today), we did not complete the mission continuously. Below are some pictures from yesterday, including the up-to-date rankings .




  • 5:07pm (PST) on Thursday, 13 July: Everything is going well today, our first day at the TRANSDEC Facility in Point Loma. Tuesday night we spent some time in the hotel pool, but the pool was so small that Wednesday evening we went to the bay (in SALT water). We were extremely encouraged by our success in the bay. We spent a few hours in the pool Wednesday night getting ready for today.

    This morning during practice we picked up the treasure chest autonomously several times. We have also accomplished each of the individual tasks except marker dropping. We are rebuilding one of droppers, but if the new design does not work, we will have two backups ready to go.

    Below are some pictures from the last two days. Due to the very poor internet we have at the competition site, the pictures may not be available for quite a while.
  • 6pm (EST) on Monday, 9 July 2007: Everyone (except me) is now sleeping (I hope). We leave at 4am on Tuesday, 10 July. We have two vans going to the Jacksonville airport, one student flying out of Miami and Dr. Schwartz leaving from Gainesville. Those flying out of Jax should arrive in San Diego by noon.

    The boxed-up submarine and three other boxes were shipped today. Six or seven other boxes will be fly with the team. We are anxious to get in the SPAWAR TRANSDEC facility to do final testing of our SubjuGator. We hope this is the best competition yet. Go Gators!