IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society, Singapore Chapter
The Singapore AUV Challenge (SAUVC) 2018
The sixth edition of the SAUVC was organized from 9 to 12 March, 2018, jointly with Singapore Polytechnic. This edition of the event was the largest ever in terms of team participation, continuing the trend set by past years of the event. This year, a record-breaking 54 teams registered for the event, of which 27 teams were selected and 26 competed at the event. Like in the previous year, a workshop on AUV related topics was also organised and details of the same has been covered in a separate report.
Student Teams
To manage the unexpected turn out of the number of teams, we introduced a criterion for the teams to qualify for participation in the event. The teams were required to submit a video of their AUV swimming without any tether attached to it for at least 10 seconds. 27 teams, of which five were local, submitted the videos and 26 teams competed at the event. In total, there were 300 student participants. This was the largest contingent of participants in the history of SAUVC. A list of teams who participated in the SAUVC 2018 and their country of origin is given below. A staggering representation of teams from all across South Asia and South East Asia was evident at this event. There were many newcomers and some familiar faces in the participating teams.
The teams exhibited creativity and uniqueness in the design of their AUVs. The designs varied in many aspects such as size, shape and weight and also in the propulsion mechanism. The team from Singapore University of Technology and Design came up with a soft-robotics based AUV, which caught the attention of many.
Qualification and Final Rounds
The challenge consisted of two tiers—qualification round and final round. Qualification involved swimming the AUV for 25 meters from a start line to a finish line, while staying within the water column without touching the pool boundaries. Only the top 15 teams, who cleared the qualification round, would be allowed to participate in the final round. In the final round, the AUV would accumulate points by completing a series of tasks aimed at testing its acoustic and visual navigation capabilities, positioning, actuation and robotic manipulation. The table below provides the different functional capabilities of the AUV being tested and the related tasks.
Each task carried a certain number of points, depending on the challenge and the difficulty involved in performing the said task. There was also a timing bonus, and a bonus associated with the static testing of AUVs. The tasks were similar to the past year’s competition, but made more challenging through randomization of positioning of buckets, flare and gate and its orientation. A complete description of the tasks, static judging criteria and award of points are covered in the competition rule book available at https://sauvc.github.io/rulebook/.
15 teams, out of the 26 that competed, made it to the final round, which is a record within the SAUVC event. This demonstrated the improving quality of participating teams, and their increased level of preparedness. This could partly be attributed to prior participation by the teams in similar competitions held locally or regionally.
Final Round Performance
One striking observation this year was that many finalists were able to complete the first task, passing through the gate with relative ease, despite the randomness introduced in the gate position and its orientation. Six teams were able to resurface at the end of their run at a designated position. This is in stark contrast to the numbers in the past few years, reflecting the improving team performance.
However, what separated the wheat from the chaff in the final round, was the ability to do tasks 2 and 4. Task 2 required the AUV to drop a ball in a designated bucket, out of the four, kept on the pool floor and task 4 was hitting a flare and dropping the ball held by it Two teams successfully completed task 2, and two teams performed task 4. Only the winning team was able to complete both task 2 and 4 in the same run. The runner-up team from NIT Rourkela was able to find the bucket with the acoustic pinger in two of their successive runs. Though two of the teams attempted, none of the teams, were able to perform task 3 of reacquiring the ball from the bucket. We hope that teams would be able to accomplish this task in a future SAUVC event.
The team from Northwestern Polytechnical University, China, who were also the defending champions, emerged as the winner for completing the largest number of the tasks. They have been doing consistently well because the team has passed on the expertise gained over the years effectively to junior teams. The team from FEFU, Russia, has also been consistently in the top 3 for the last 4 years. The top 3 teams in the finals are as follows:
- Northwestern Polytechnical University, China
- National Institute of Technology, Rourkela, India
- Far Eastern Federal University/Institute of Marine Technology Problems, Russia
Award Presentation Ceremony
The final winners were announced at an award presentation ceremony on the 12th of March, which was followed by a networking dinner. This saw about two hundred students come together with the guest speakers, SAUVC committee members and volunteers, for an eventful evening to close the competition. The award presentation saw some fun-filled and high-adrenaline moments when each of the prizes were announced. Loud cheers erupted when video summaries of the competition days were played, one by one, while participants rejoiced over the memories of the past 4 days. The networking dinner was hosted to show our appreciation to the participating student teams and our sponsors and volunteers, as well as facilitate good interaction to bring the curtains down on the event. A plaque was presented to the SAUVC 2018 committee by IEEE OES, in appreciation of their efforts in organizing the event successfully with such a large outreach.
We continued with the photo competition, which was started in 2016, to engage more students, including non-participants on the competition. This has also helped to get more visibility of the event. This year, the numbers for the competition went through the roof. The top two photos, which got 26,000 and 21,000 likes, are shown below. They were from the Zakir Hussain college of Engineering and technology, India and Bogor Agricultural university, Indonesia respectively.
IEEE OES presenting a plaque to the committee in appreciation of efforts in organizing SAUVC 2018. The two most liked photos in the Facebook photography competition, with 26000 and 21000 likes respectively. Dinner and discussions, that’s the way we do it.
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Media Coverage, Publicity And Website Visibility
The publicity stats this time were impressive. The competition was extensively covered on social media (Facebook, Twitter and YouTube) by our social media team. The SAUVC Facebook page saw very high activity, from the numbers we obtained from Facebook page statistics. The viral reach of the page from 8 to 13 March, which was the number of people who had any content from our page enter their screen, was 74,838 Facebook users. The total number of times any content from the SAUVC page entered a user’s screen was 245,834 times from 8 to 13 March.
We undertook extensive video coverage this time. This included video interviews with all the teams who participated at the event, getting their views on the competition and their experience at the event. There were also video interviews with the guests who attended. Interviews of the teams and guests, and daily highlights from the event, are available at https://www.youtube.com/user/ARLTMSINUSChannel/playlists
The website www.sauvc.org was revamped for this year’s event and sported a trendy look. It also saw a very high activity. Some statistics on the website usage are shown here. The highest usage seems to be from India, where most of the participating teams came from. However, it is surprising to see that the event page was accessed from 6 continents around the world. The event also saw good media publicity, especially in Bangladesh and India, where it was covered in national newspapers such as ‘Telegraph India’ and ‘The Daily Star’.
Feedback
We sought post-event anonymous feedback from the teams through an online survey. The feedback was excellent. Some statistics on the feedback are shown in an infographic here.
Some testimonials we received are as follows:
“I loved that everyone was very friendly and they were ready to help me whenever I needed some assistance. And other teams were also very cooperative. Learnt a lot in these 4 days.”
“Come to learn, not to win. There’s more to learn from this competition than anywhere else about Oceanic Engineering. I would love to come back over and over again.”
“It’s the best competition for first timers. And most of the teams also come through all the difficulties as you’ve gone through…so participate and learn…”
Sponsorship
The SAUVC event is run solely using sponsorship money. IEEE OES has been the biggest supporter of this event since its inception in 2013. One of the other regular academic sponsors was the National University of Singapore. As in past years, a number of companies supported the event, including some returning sponsors and some new ones. The company logos were displayed at standees located around the event venue, and announced throughout the event. Social media publicity was also given for the sponsors. One of the sponsors, Sonardyne also set up a booth at the competition venue displaying some of their products and related catalogues.
Membership Drive
Like previous years, we organized a membership drive during SAUVC 2018. This involved spreading awareness on the benefits of membership via leaflets, pamphlets and poster standees. A membership recruitment talk for IEEE OES was also delivered at the opening of the workshop on autonomous marine systems, by Dr. Hari Vishnu, chair of the IEEE OES, Singapore chapter. Students were asked whether they were interested in a free one year student membership offer, and many students signed up for the same expressing their interest.
Acknowledgements
SAUVC 2018 was graced by several eminent underwater robotics experts from around the world. This includes Dr. William Kirkwood from Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, a familiar face at SAUVC, who has been very supportive and encouraging of the event. His presence at the event has always been a morale booster for the teams and organizers. Dr. Thomas Curtin from Applied Physics lab, Washington, joined the party this time, helping out in judging at the event, and also sharing some very helpful words with the teams from his years of experience in organizing the Robosub competition. Dr. Hayato Kondo from Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology was also a constant presence amongst the teams, and could be seen discussing with students on their AUVs.
SAUVC has been running for six years successfully now, growing each year and becoming possibly the largest underwater robotics events for students in Asia. One aspect of SAUVC is that it does not charge a registration fee for teams to participate. This is a policy aimed at promoting fledgling teams to compete, and generate interest in underwater robotics. SAUVC is also popular for its outreach, and we also try our best to provide mentoring for teams. It was encouraging to see that there was very good information sharing amongst the teams. Most teams took home the message that SAUVC is all about learning and sharing rather than just competing. As far as we, the SAUVC committee are concerned, this is the biggest win of all.
Suleman Mazhar has been working as a professor in Information & Communication Engineering at Harbin Engineering University (China) since July 2019. He did PhD from Tokyo University (Japan) and postdoctorate from Georgetown University (Washington DC, USA). He had BS-CS from FAST-NUCES (Lahore) and MS from GIK Institute (Pakistan). He is TYSP young scientist fellow (Ministry of Science & Technology China) and have won several research grants from international organizations such as DAAD (Germany), ICIMOD (Nepal), NRPU (Higher Education Commission Pakistan), WWF (Worldwide Fund for Nature) Pakistan. His research focus is deep learning and signal processing applications for environmental monitoring, with particular focus on underwater acoustics, and marine mammal conservation. He is a reviewer for professional journals such as Journal of Acoustical Society (America), IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering, IEEE Sensors Journal, Applied Acoustics, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems.
Peng Ren is a full professor with the College of Oceanography and Space Informatics, China University of Petroleum (East China). He is the director of Qingdao International Research Center for Intelligent Forecast and Detection of Oceanic Catastrophes. He received the K. M. Scott Prize from the University of York, the Natural Science award (first rank) from China Institute of Electronics, and the Eduardo Caianiello Best Student Paper Award from 18th International Conference on Image Analysis and Processing as one co-author. He has served as an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing.
Mohd Rizal Arshad is a full professor at the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), Malaysia, where he specializes in ocean robotics technology and intelligent system. He received his B.Eng. in Medical Electronics & Instrumentation and PhD in Electronic Engineering from University of Liverpool, UK in 1994 and 1999, respectively. He completed his MSc. in Electronic Control Engineering from the University of Salford, UK in Dec 1995. He has supervised many postgraduate students and published extensively in local and international publications. He is a senior member of the IEEE, and was awarded IEEE OES Presidential Award in 2019.
Itzik Klein is an Assistant Professor, heading the Autonomous Navigation and Sensor Fusion Lab, at the Charney School of Marine Sciences, Hatter Department of Marine Technologies, University of Haifa. He is an IEEE Senior Member and a member of the IEEE Journal of Indoor and Seamless Positioning and Navigation (J-ISPIN) Editorial Board. Prior to joining the University of Haifa, he worked at leading companies in Israel on navigation topics for more than 15 years. He has a wide range of experience in navigation systems and sensor fusion from both industry and academic perspectives. His research interests lie in the intersection of artificial intelligence with inertial sensing, sensor fusion, and autonomous underwater vehicles.
John R. Potter (IEEE M’94, SM’02, F’18) graduated in the previous century with a joint honours Mathematics and Physics Degree from Bristol and a PhD. in Glaciology and Oceanography from Cambridge, UK studying Antarctic ice mass balance, where he spent four consecutive summers. This work helped underscore the non-linear fragility of polar ice to climate change and led to him receiving the Polar Medal from Queen Elizabeth II in 1988.
Nick is a Visiting Fellow at the UK National Oceanographic Center, Southampton His nomination was endorsed by the Underwater Acoustics Technology Committee. He had worked as a Research Associate and Lecturer at University of Birmingham and has been working as a Research Scientist at the Applied Research Laboratory, University of Texas, Austin. He has also served as a Program Officer at the Office of Naval Research Global. He is a senior member of IEEE (OES) and a Fellow of Acoustical Society of America (ASA). Nick has also been serving as Assoc. Editor for IEEE JoE and JASA. He is widely acknowledged for his expertise are seabed acoustics, parametric array modeling, sonar beamformer, underwater signal processing.
Maurizio Migliaccio (M’91-SM’00-F’17) is Full professor of Electromagnetics at Università di Napoli Parthenope (Italy) and was Affiliated Full Professor at NOVA Southeastern University, Fort Lauderdale, FL (USA). He has been teaching Microwave Remote Sensing since 1994. He was visiting scientist at Deutsche Forschungsanstalt fur Lüft und Raumfahrt (DLR), Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany. He was member of the Italian Space Agency (ASI) scientific committee. He was member of the ASI CosmoSkyMed second generation panel. He was e-geos AdCom member. He was Italian delegate of the ESA PB-EO board. He was Member of South Africa Expert Review Panel for Space Exploration. He serves as reviewer for the UE, Italian Research Ministry (MIUR), NCST, Kazakhstan and Hong Kong Research board. He lectured in USA, Canada, Brazil, China, Hong Kong, Germany, Spain, Czech Republic, Switzerland and Italy. He was Italian delegate at UE COST SMOS Mode Action. He is listed in the Italian Top Scientists. He is an IEEE Trans. Geoscience and Remote Sensing AE, International Journal of Remote Sensing AE, and was IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering AE Special Issue on Radar for Marine and Maritime Remote Sensing, IEEE JSTARS AE of the Special Issue on CosmoSKyMed, Member of the Indian Journal of Radio & Space Physics Editorial board. His main current scientific interests cover SAR sea oil slick and man-made target monitoring, remote sensing for marine and coastal applications, remote sensing for agriculture monitoring, polarimetry, inverse problems for resolution enhancement, reverberating chambers. He published about 160 peer-reviewed journal papers on remote sensing and applied electromagnetics.
He has developed various types of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) and related application technologies including navigation methods, a new sensing method using a chemical sensor, precise seafloor mapping methods, a precise seabed positioning system with a resolution of a few centimeters, a new sensing system of the thickness of cobalt-rich crust; and more. He has shown, by using these technologies that AUVs are practicable and valuable tools for deep-sea exploration.
Donna Kocak has had an outstanding career in defense and scientific projects developing and applying solutions in subsea optics, imaging and robotics. She graduated with an M.Sc in Computer Science in 1997 from the University of Central Florida; an MBA in 2008 from the University of Florida; and M.Sc in Industrial Engineering in 2011 from the University of Central Florida. She is currently a Senior Scientist, Advanced Concepts Engineering, and Fellow at the Harris Corporation in Melbourne, Florida, where she has developed novel optical imaging and communication solutions for under-sea defense and scientific projects. Prior to 2008 Donna Kocak was Founder and President of Green Sky Imaging, LLC (GSI) who developed laser/video photogrammetry software for underwater inspection and survey. Her earlier career positions were with Naval Training Systems Center, Florida; Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution, Florida; eMerge Interactive; and the Advanced Technologies Group in Florida.
John Potter has a Joint Honours degree in Mathematics and Physics from Bristol University in the UK and a PhD in Glaciology and Oceanography from the University of Cambridge on research in the Antarctic, for which he was awarded the Polar Medal in 1988. John has worked on polar oceanography, underwater acoustics, ambient noise (including imaging), marine mammals, communications, IoUT, autonomous vehicles and strategic development. He has 40 years’ international experience working at the British Antarctic Survey in the UK, NATO in Italy, SIO in California, NUS in Singapore and most recently at NTNU in Norway. John is a Fellow of the IEEE and MTS, an Associate Editor for the IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering, IEEE OES Distinguished Lecturer, PADI Master Scuba Diver Trainer & an International Fellow of the Explorer’s Club.
Dr. James V. Candy is the Chief Scientist for Engineering and former Director of the Center for Advanced Signal & Image Sciences at the University of California, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Dr. Candy received a commission in the USAF in 1967 and was a Systems Engineer/Test Director from 1967 to 1971. He has been a Researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory since 1976 holding various positions including that of Project Engineer for Signal Processing and Thrust Area Leader for Signal and Control Engineering. Educationally, he received his B.S.E.E. degree from the University of Cincinnati and his M.S.E. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Florida, Gainesville. He is a registered Control System Engineer in the state of California. He has been an Adjunct Professor at San Francisco State University, University of Santa Clara, and UC Berkeley, Extension teaching graduate courses in signal and image processing. He is an Adjunct Full-Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. Candy is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) and elected as a Life Member (Fellow) at the University of Cambridge (Clare Hall College). He is a member of Eta Kappa Nu and Phi Kappa Phi honorary societies. He was elected as a Distinguished Alumnus by the University of Cincinnati. Dr. Candy received the IEEE Distinguished Technical Achievement Award for the “development of model-based signal processing in ocean acoustics.” Dr. Candy was selected as a IEEE Distinguished Lecturer for oceanic signal processing as well as presenting an IEEE tutorial on advanced signal processing available through their video website courses. He was nominated for the prestigious Edward Teller Fellowship at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Dr. Candy was awarded the Interdisciplinary Helmholtz-Rayleigh Silver Medal in Signal Processing/Underwater Acoustics by the Acoustical Society of America for his technical contributions. He has published over 225 journal articles, book chapters, and technical reports as well as written three texts in signal processing, “Signal Processing: the Model-Based Approach,” (McGraw-Hill, 1986), “Signal Processing: the Modern Approach,” (McGraw-Hill, 1988), “Model-Based Signal Processing,” (Wiley/IEEE Press, 2006) and “Bayesian Signal Processing: Classical, Modern and Particle Filtering” (Wiley/IEEE Press, 2009). He was the General Chairman of the inaugural 2006 IEEE Nonlinear Statistical Signal Processing Workshop held at the Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge. He has presented a variety of short courses and tutorials sponsored by the IEEE and ASA in Applied Signal Processing, Spectral Estimation, Advanced Digital Signal Processing, Applied Model-Based Signal Processing, Applied Acoustical Signal Processing, Model-Based Ocean Acoustic Signal Processing and Bayesian Signal Processing for IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society/ASA. He has also presented short courses in Applied Model-Based Signal Processing for the SPIE Optical Society. He is currently the IEEE Chair of the Technical Committee on “Sonar Signal and Image Processing” and was the Chair of the ASA Technical Committee on “Signal Processing in Acoustics” as well as being an Associate Editor for Signal Processing of ASA (on-line JASAXL). He was recently nominated for the Vice Presidency of the ASA and elected as a member of the Administrative Committee of IEEE OES. His research interests include Bayesian estimation, identification, spatial estimation, signal and image processing, array signal processing, nonlinear signal processing, tomography, sonar/radar processing and biomedical applications.
Kenneth Foote is a Senior Scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. He received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from The George Washington University in 1968, and a Ph.D. in Physics from Brown University in 1973. He was an engineer at Raytheon Company, 1968-1974; postdoctoral scholar at Loughborough University of Technology, 1974-1975; research fellow and substitute lecturer at the University of Bergen, 1975-1981. He began working at the Institute of Marine Research, Bergen, in 1979; joined the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in 1999. His general area of expertise is in underwater sound scattering, with applications to the quantification of fish, other aquatic organisms, and physical scatterers in the water column and on the seafloor. In developing and transitioning acoustic methods and instruments to operations at sea, he has worked from 77°N to 55°S.
René Garello, professor at Télécom Bretagne, Fellow IEEE, co-leader of the TOMS (Traitements, Observations et Méthodes Statistiques) research team, in Pôle CID of the UMR CNRS 3192 Lab-STICC.
Professor Mal Heron is Adjunct Professor in the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, and is CEO of Portmap Remote Ocean Sensing Pty Ltd. His PhD work in Auckland, New Zealand, was on radio-wave probing of the ionosphere, and that is reflected in his early ionospheric papers. He changed research fields to the scattering of HF radio waves from the ocean surface during the 1980s. Through the 1990s his research has broadened into oceanographic phenomena which can be studied by remote sensing, including HF radar and salinity mapping from airborne microwave radiometers . Throughout, there have been one-off papers where he has been involved in solving a problem in a cognate area like medical physics, and paleobiogeography. Occasionally, he has diverted into side-tracks like a burst of papers on the effect of bushfires on radio communications. His present project of the Australian Coastal Ocean Radar Network (ACORN) is about the development of new processing methods and applications of HF radar data to address oceanography problems. He is currently promoting the use of high resolution VHF ocean radars, based on the PortMap high resolution radar.
Hanu Singh graduated B.S. ECE and Computer Science (1989) from George Mason University and Ph.D. (1995) from MIT/Woods Hole.He led the development and commercialization of the Seabed AUV, nine of which are in operation at other universities and government laboratories around the world. He was technical lead for development and operations for Polar AUVs (Jaguar and Puma) and towed vehicles(Camper and Seasled), and the development and commercialization of the Jetyak ASVs, 18 of which are currently in use. He was involved in the development of UAS for polar and oceanographic applications, and high resolution multi-sensor acoustic and optical mapping with underwater vehicles on over 55 oceanographic cruises in support of physical oceanography, marine archaeology, biology, fisheries, coral reef studies, geology and geophysics and sea-ice studies. He is an accomplished Research Student advisor and has made strong collaborations across the US (including at MIT, SIO, Stanford, Columbia LDEO) and internationally including in the UK, Australia, Canada, Korea, Taiwan, China, Japan, India, Sweden and Norway. Hanu Singh is currently Chair of the IEEE Ocean Engineering Technology Committee on Autonomous Marine Systems with responsibilities that include organizing the biennial IEEE AUV Conference, 2008 onwards. Associate Editor, IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering, 2007-2011. Associate editor, Journal of Field Robotics 2012 onwards.
Milica Stojanovic graduated from the University of Belgrade, Serbia, in 1988, and received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Northeastern University in Boston, in 1991 and 1993. She was a Principal Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and in 2008 joined Northeastern University, where she is currently a Professor of electrical and computer engineering. She is also a Guest Investigator at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Milica’s research interests include digital communications theory, statistical signal processing and wireless networks, and their applications to underwater acoustic systems. She has made pioneering contributions to underwater acoustic communications, and her work has been widely cited. She is a Fellow of the IEEE, and serves as an Associate Editor for its Journal of Oceanic Engineering (and in the past for Transactions on Signal Processing and Transactions on Vehicular Technology). She also serves on the Advisory Board of the IEEE Communication Letters, and chairs the IEEE Ocean Engineering Society’s Technical Committee for Underwater Communication, Navigation and Positioning. Milica is the recipient of the 2015 IEEE/OES Distinguished Technical Achievement Award.
Dr. Paul C. Hines was born and raised in Glace Bay, Cape Breton. From 1977-1981 he attended Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, graduating with a B.Sc. (Hon) in Engineering-Physics.