News in Press-centre

Far Eastern Federal University Robotics Engineers started to train in the campus swimming pool to get prepared for 2016 International RoboSub Competition. The FEFU undergraduate and graduate students will present their upgraded Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) at this unofficial Robotics world championship. The competition involving teams of the world's strongest technical universities will be held on July 25–31 in San Diego, California.

RoboSub is traditionally held at the US Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center. It is expected that this year's competitive rivalry will be higher as ever before—52 teams from China, India, Japan, Singapore, Thailand, Brazil, the United States, Canada and Turkey declared to participate. 32 university teams will represent the United States and the team of Admiral Nevelskoy Maritime State University together with FEFU will go to RoboSub from Russia.

As reported by the University team member, graduate student in the School of Engineering, Anton Tolstonogov, the preparations for the competition began in March this year, immediately upon the return from the Singapore AUV Challenge, the Asia international open competition, where FEFU Robotics Engineers won a silver medal for Russia. It was decided not to design a new AUV for RoboSub 2016, but to upgrade the one that worthily proved itself last year, and won the prize place for the team. Almost for four months Robotics Engineers had worked on its modernization in the lab and now they started training in the water.

"It looks like the same AUV, but, actually, we changed its most important part—software—due to which the vehicle performs a mission on its own, without communicating with people. We also added the remote console to be able to switch on the AUV and to perform basic actions from the shore," explained Anton Tolstonogov.

According to the experienced participant in RoboSub, the mission of the upcoming competition is dedicated to the pirate theme, but the tasks are very similar to the last year's one. The AUV will go through the gate underwater, determine the color of buoys at depth by using video perception, it also shall be able to move sideways, to throw balls, and to fire pneumatic torpedoes to the specified target. This time the organizers put special emphasis on the sonar capabilities of the AUVs and added the tasks for searching pingers (sound sources).

Underwater Robotics is a priority area for Far Eastern Federal University, which is implemented within the framework of the Development Program and Competitiveness Enhancement Program under the 5 top100 Project. FEFU has achieved international standing in this area and its world leadership is confirmed by the successful performance of the university teams in the prestigious competitions. In 2013 FEFU students with their AUV bagged the 1^st place at the Asia international open competition Singapore AUV Challenge, and in 2015 and 2016 they won silver medals for Russia there. From 2012 FEFU has participated in RoboSub, the world's Robotics Engineers competition, and each year ranked among the winners. The students were twice absolute world champions in the class of remotely piloted vehicles.