After placing tenth in last year’s competition for autonomous underwater vehicles, the university’s Robotics @ Maryland club hoped to rank in the top five this summer.

But thanks to a robot far more advanced than its predecessor, the club was in for a big surprise.

Robotics @ Maryland took first place at the 11th Annual International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition in San Diego, which took place from July 29 to Aug. 3. The competition featured 25 schools from around the world as they competed to see whose robot is capable of performing the most tasks underwater.

Members of the robotics club were shocked by the unexpected win.

“It didn’t really sink in at first because we were so surprised,” said Joseph Gland, the graduate advisor to the club. “We went into the competition thinking it would be great getting second place.”

The competition required each school’s robot to accomplish a set of objectives in a giant pool of water. The robots must go through a gate, follow a predetermined path, drive into a red ball, go through a tunnel, locate an item, pick that item up and surface to a designated target. The robots must perform all of the above by themselves, without the aid of remote control or human guidance.

The club’s robot, called Tortuga II, was able to finish most of the tasks successfully. To complete each objective, the robot had to navigate to several locations all on its own, using a camera and sonar technology to find its way around.

“It’s like a little animal,” said Steve Moskovchenko, a recent graduate who specializes in electronics for the club. “It’s alive. You can tell it what to do, but it’s got a mind of its own.”

Tortuga II’s ability to self-navigate is a far cry from the robot the club had last year, which could only move in a straight line, said Joseph Lisee, a computer science and aerospace engineering major who also leads the club’s software team. In fact, last year’s robot was only able to finish one task at the competition: going through the gate. It was unable to swim to the other objectives.

But such a major leap in technology came at a price. Members of the club had to dedicate most of their free time to making the win possible. While other students may spend their weekends partying, the club got together on Friday nights to work on the robot, said Nicholas Limparis, an electrical engineering major who graduated last semester and is the co-leader of the electronics team.

There was so much work to be done that Moskovchenko said he sometimes designed the robot’s circuit boards during class. Staying up until 5 a.m. was a common occurrence for him, but he claimed “engineers are nocturnal.”

This is only Robotics @ Maryland’s second year in the competition. Team members said their victory would not be possible without the university’s Space Systems Lab, which provided them with a pool to test their robot in. Gland said no other team in the competition had access to this kind of facility.

The robot has been a two-year effort and is funded mostly by the school, including the engineering school, the aerospace engineering department, the computer and electrical engineering department and the Institute for Systems Research and the University of Maryland Division of Research. Companies such as Apple, BAE Systems, and E.K. Fox also sponsored the project.

Members of the club said they were on the edge of their seats when they realized that victory was imminent.

“We were ecstatic and amazed it actually won,” said Tom Capon, a electrical engineering and physics major who serves as vice president of the club. “[But] the tension in those last few minutes was incredible.”

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