Humble Beginnings

The club and Hammerhead at the 2000 competition

The Amador Valley High School Robotics Club was founded in 1999 by an intrepid group of students with a passion for robotics. These students decided to enter the International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition, a competition in which only colleges competed. Despite this, with their ingenuity and dedication, they placed 6th at the 2000 competition with their AUV Hammerhead, above several of the nation's most prestigious colleges. Each year, this club continues their tradition of excellence at the annual competition.

A Brief History

The club with a $4000 check for 2nd place

After this momentous first step, the club continued to improve upon its designs and algorithms for their second generation sub, the Manta Ray. At the 2001 competition, we placed second only to MIT! This well-deserved victory showed that a group of high school students with dedication could do better than college students with more funds and resources. Since then, the club has competed in every competition and has had many successful finishes with its Barracuda line of subs.

Today

This year, we have a very enthusiastic group of students who are eager to learn about the subsystems of the sub. In addition, we have three main projects for each branch of the team that are designed to improve one aspect of the sub. Mechanical team has been working on getting better propellers and improving the overall body of the sub. Electrical team has vastly improved the interconnections between components of the sub and is also working on triangulation with hydrophones to locate the pinger, which will be used as a point of reference throughout the mission and especially during the end. Software team has worked on restructuring the code to be more modular and has also replaced the CMU camera with a more full-featured webcam, and is using computer vision software to help navigate the sub. With all our improvements this year, we are looking forward to a very successful and rewarding competition.

The Future

For the future, we hope to correct many of the problems that we have had in the past. One of our main issues has been the fact that knowledge of the sub often leaves with graduating members, and then incoming members are often left clueless. We hope to rectify this by codifying all our knowledge of the sub into a wiki, so that future members will have an easy-to-access reference on the inner workings of the sub. Another issue has been planning. We hope to set deadlines for specific, concrete milestones in the future to mitigate this issue. With these efforts, we hope to improve our performance at the competition and lower our stress levels.