Humble beginnings.

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.

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.

The club today.

This year, we have a very enthusiastic group of students who are eager to learn about the subsystems of the sub. We've organized the team into three subgroups, allowing students to focus on aspects that interest them. The mechanical team has been working on improving the efficiency of the propulsion, maintaining watertightness and stability while reducing drag. The electrical team has vastly improved the communications between the sensors and components of the sub, developing custom electronics to provide low-level control of the submarine and to locate the acoustic pinger using multilateration. The software team has worked on restructuring the code to eliminate overhead while keeping the modular design. They are also using computer vision software in conjunction with webcams mounted in the front dome to help navigate the sub and complete the mission tasks. With all our improvements this year, we are looking forward to a very successful and rewarding competition.

The future.

In the future, we hope to correct many of the problems that we have had in the past. One of our main issues has been that knowledge of the sub often leaves with graduating members. We hope to solve 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. We have also worked on smaller training projects to help younger members gain an understanding of basic electronics, programming, and engineering. 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.