Three hundred and fifty teams. Forty-four countries. Seven competitions. One community.
 
After spending an entire year or more working tirelessly to create robotic vehicles, teams from all over the world attempted one or more of the seven competitions sponsored by RoboNation, the new name of the former AUVSI Foundation. Not only were these students in school while they worked on their projects, many had jobs and internships, on top of finding the time and resources to build a successful system. 
 
Common across all RoboNation competitions are the threads of real-world applications woven into the tasks and missions of each program. Regardless of the domain, whether on the ground, in the air or on or under the water, RoboNation programs have become ideal proving grounds for future technologies and leaders alike.
 
International Seaperch Challenge
 
Kicking off RoboNation summer competitions was the International SeaPerch Challenge, held June 1-3 in North Dartmouth, Massachusetts. SeaPerch brought together teams from 31 states, the Cayman Islands, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and New Zealand, who earned the right to compete against their peers by winning at 80 registered regional qualifiers held earlier in the year. This year more than 1,200 people gathered for a fun weekend of learning, sharing, competing and heart-pounding excitement, including 170 teams comprised of 657 students. Compare this phenomenal grown with the first National SeaPerch Challenge held in Philadelphia in 2011, where just 38 teams participated.
 
Teams took on the in-pool technical competition, navigating the challenge course on day one and the obstacle course the following day. Additionally, 26 teams with top-scoring engineering notebooks in each division gave oral presentations to a panel of engineers, educators and other professionals to showcase their ability to document the engineering design process used to build and modify their SeaPerch to meet the pool challenges. 
 
The overall winner was the team Hetwiler Halibuts, of Fleming Island, Florida.
 
Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition (IGVC)
 
While the younger generation was facing the waters of UMass Dartmouth, 32 teams of college students from four countries gathered in the fields at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, June 1-4 to test their intelligent ground vehicles at this year’s IGVC. The technologies involved in the IGVC represent military mobility, intelligent transportation systems and manufacturing.
 
The main competition is split into three challenges: The Auto-Nav Challenge, where teams must design and build a fully autonomous unmanned ground robotic vehicle that maneuvers and navigates through an outdoor obstacle course while maintaining a speed between one and five miles per hour; the Interoperability Profiles Challenge, which facilitates the testing of interoperability between the controller, robotic platforms and payloads; and the Design Challenge, where teams are required to submit a written report and give an oral presentation on their design strategy and process.
 
For the second year, IGVC hosted another challenge, the Self-Drive Challenge, designed for quadricycle-type electrical vehicles that are equipped with automotive drive-by-wire systems. Vehicles are required to be in autonomous mode while they complete minimum speed, lane following, obstacle avoidance and waypoint navigation tasks. 
 
Both the Bluefield State Robotics Team of West Virginia and the Hosei University Team of Japan proved their skill and determination with their robots Apollo IV (Bluefield) and Orange2018 (Hosei), and emerged as the overall winners.

A student competitor adjusts his team's robot at the IGVC. Photo: RoboNation
 
Student Unmanned Aerial Systems (SUAS)
 
Representing more than 10 countries, 51 teams attended the 16th SUAS Competition, held June 13-16 at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Maryland’s Webster Field annex. Taking on any and all flight conditions, teams have one chance and 45 minutes to prove their aerial system can complete the mission. 
 
During their mission, the scoring is broken up into 6 components:
 

• Timeline. Each mission must stay within the restricted timeline, including set-up, flight time and teardown of the UAS.
• Autonomous flight. Staying autonomous throughout flight, teams have a better chance of completing challenges and avoiding issues with connectivity loss and other occurrences that might be encountered in real-world environments.
• Obstacle avoidance. The UAS must be able to avoid obstacles it might encounter during its flight, including stationary and moving obstacles.
• Object detection, classification, localization. Creating a real-world situation, the UAS is required to locate a standard object, a colored alphanumeric painted outside of the flight boundary, and an emergent object, a dummy representing a person in an activity of interest (i.e. a firefighter).
• Air delivery. The UAS must drop an object closest to a designated drop location. 
• Operational excellence. Evaluating overall performance, including professionalism, team communication, reaction to system failures, safety and more. 

 
For the third year in a row, the Université de Sherbrooke team from Québec, Canada, brought home the first-place trophy. The VAMUdeS team flew autonomously, captured waypoints, avoided obstacles and dropped a water bottle within 17 feet of the drop location. 

A team works on their aircraft at the SUAS. Photo: RoboNation
 
RoboBoat
 
At the 11th annual RoboBoat competition, held June 18-24 in South Daytona, Florida, 13 high school and college teams unleash their autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) into the waters of Reed Canal Park. This year brought brand-new teams from the Netherlands (Delft University), Canada (University of Ottawa) and Indonesia (Universitas Diponegoro). Teams focused on completing one of the many tasks embedded in each course, including: Autonomous navigation, speed challenge, automated docking, find the path, follow the leader and return to dock. 
 
The weather brought difficult times during the practice week, including heavy thunderstorms, causing two practice days to end early. With limited time to test vehicles in the water, teams experienced major roadblocks as they prepared to face qualifying runs on Saturday. Taking advantage of using Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University’s pool to test overnight, six teams overcame the weather on Saturday to qualify for Sunday’s finals: Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Hagerty High School, University of Michigan, Nathan Hale High School and Delft University.  Sunday morning, the remaining seven teams each had just one last chance to qualify for finals. In the end, Florida Atlantic University and Georgia Institute of Technology beat out the rest of the field for the two remaining slots. During finals, teams had to complete tasks of speed, maneuverability, docking and more. 
 
In the end, Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember of Surabaya, Indonesia, was able to tackle the most obstacles, earning them the most points and first place.
 
RoboSub
 
Forty-seven teams from 10 different countries once again gathered in sunny San Diego, California July 30-Aug. 5 with one mission in mind: demonstrate autonomy with their autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) through various tasks mimicking behaviors required of AUVs to operate successfully in the real world. 
 
Teams designed and programmed mechanical and electrical platforms to accomplish the key functions of autonomy. Giving the vehicles perception allowed them to know what to look for underwater. Taking video footage from previous practice runs helped them complete tasks like “shoot craps,” where the AUVs must touch a dice (buoy) moored to the bottom of the Navy’s Transdec pool by recognizing the object and calculating what to do next. 
 
A huge component of RoboSub was the collaboration between teams. Using all open-source data, teams are able to share findings with others to play off each teams’ strengths and functionalities. Teams use other teams experience to accomplish tasks such as “play slots,” where an AUV must pull the arm of a slot machine and fire torpedoes through one of the revealed openings, or “buy gold chips,” where the AUV must collect a gold chip by pushing a plate. Many teams have started using simulation with their approach at completing the mission to better prepare their systems to take on the course. 
 
One of the 2018 RoboNation sponsors, Northrop Grumman, visited the RoboSub competition and awarded the all-female Texas A&M University team with 10 internship opportunities for next summer.
 
Harbin Engineering University from Harbin, China, made waves with a score of over 12,000 points in their final run and went home as not only the second international team to win at RoboSub, but the first Chinese team to win first place.
 
International Aerial Robotics Competition (IARC)
 
As the only mission-based RoboNation competition, the International Aerial Robotics Competition (IARC) had a momentous summer closing out Mission 7. Since its opening in August of 2014, 50 teams in two venues, the American venue and Asia-Pacific venue, have attempted the mission. The American venue competition was held July 31-Aug. 2 in Atlanta and the Asia-Pacific competition was held Aug. 25-27 in Beijing.
 
With the goal of advancing the state-of-art in aerial robotics, each IARC mission is proposed without existing solutions for the required behaviors. Mission 7 required a robot to physically interact with ground robots, touching the top or blocking any forward motion, ultimately changing the direction of the robots to “herd” them to one side of the arena. To increase difficulty, these ground robots were programmed to change direction randomly. Additionally, aerial vehicles had to avoid four obstacles that circled the arena and caused collisions with the ground robots.
 
This year at the Asia-Pacific Venue, the team from Zhejiang University of Hangzhou, China, showed the top performance. Zhejiang’s aerial vehicle was able to exhibit the behaviors to effectively complete the mission and herd three ground robots in their best performing run. 

A scene from the dual-venue IARC. Photo: RoboNation
 
Maritime RobotX Challenge
 
In a few short weeks, teams from six countries will gather on the beautiful island of Oahu, Hawaii to showcase their 16-foot, fully autonomous maritime system (AMS) in the Maritime RobotX Challenge, to be held Dec. 8-15 in Honolulu. As RoboNation’s most complex robotic competition to date, RobotX teams exhibit advancements in autonomous vehicle technology across all domains. 
 
The Maritime RobotX Challenge is a biennial competition designed to foster student interest in autonomous robotic systems operating in the maritime domain, with an emphasis on the science and engineering of cooperative autonomy. The purpose of RobotX is to enhance the community of innovators capable of substantive contributions to the domain of autonomous, unmanned, multi-domain vehicles. As such, RobotX also hosts a forum in non-competition years to further facilitate the building of international relationships between students, academic institutions, and industry partners.
 
Upon demonstrating navigation and vehicle control, the 2018 teams will take on a course designed to test their vehicle’s ability to complete individual tasks as well as operate as a fully autonomous robotic system in an open maritime environment. December in Hawaii can bring variable conditions and challenges to these teams and those interested in following their progress can do so at robotx.org.
 
Sponsors for the 2018 season include Autodesk, AUVSI, AUVSI Great Lakes Chapter, AUVSI Seafarer Chapter, Blue Robotics, Fischer Connectors, General Atomics-ASI, MathWorks, Northrop Grumman, NVIDIA, Raytheon, SeaDrone, Seenit, Siemens, SolidWorks, Teledyne Marine, Velodyne LiDAR, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and more.

Below: A robot competitor moves out at the RoboBoat competition. Photo: RoboNation