Don’t forget that the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International’s 11th Annual International Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Competition is taking place this weekend in San Diego, CA.

This year’s theme is “Underseas 11″ and will feature gambling themed tasks, such as grabbing a sack of cash from a “bank vault”, traversing an “air duct” (a floating PCV structure), and the like.

The competition is open to the public this Saturday and Sunday and is held at the U.S. Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare (SPAWAR) Systems Center’s Transducer Evaluation Center (TRANSDEC) pool located on Point Loma, San Diego. You can read the spectator FAQ (PDF) for more details.

25 teams from around the glob are registered for the competition, including my alma mater, NC State University. The teams have to construct a fully autonomous underwater vehicle that is capable of navigating, using machine vision, and acoustic navigation. It should be interesting (the competition is rather boring, since it’s underwater, but talking to the teams is fun). So, if you’re in the area, please go out and cheer them on. Send me some pictures if you do.

Update: The team from Cornell appears to be live-blogging the event.

Update 2: You can watch a live webcast of the finals here. It looks like the underwater video is being shot with an LBV from Seabotix.

Update 3: Here’s a list of the teams going into the finals.

Update 4: You can see the final standings here. Surprise ending!

Boeing has announced that they will be purchasing Insitu Inc., which is a major player in the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) market. The two companies have a prior history of working together from as early as 2002, on the ScanEagle project. Insitu is projected to have revenue of $150 million USD this year, which is up 70% from last year. Insitu also makes the Integrator, GeoRanger, and Insight UAV systems. The purchase price has not been disclosed. Insitu will operate as a seperate subsidiary of Boeing. Insitu is based in Bingen, Washington and currently has 360 employees.

This will most definitely not be the last of such acquisitions. As the UAV market grows, be on the lookout for much larger aerospace companies like Northrop Gumman and Lockheed, to buy up all the smaller companies.

This site should be fully transitioned from Joomla to WordPress. If you find any lingering problems, send me an email or message me on Twitter. I’m also still looking for a theme designer, as the current theme is a bit piecemeal.

Thanks again everyone for your patience and continued support. You rock!

LEGO has recently come out with a new linear actuator piece as part of their new Power Function sets. The new actuators have a movement range of 5 studs, or about 1.6 in (4cm), which correspond to 26 full revolutions of the input shaft. The actuators also have a built in clutch mechanism to prevent damage from over-extension. Klocki has more pictures of the actuators. This may be a useful alternative to much more expensive linear actuators, like the ones from Firgelli.

MIT’s OpenCourseware page is an excellent resource for learning some high level topics in many fields. The school has placed many of their course materials online, and freely available to the public. There is quite a few courses listed in the engineering category. Just today I saw that they’ve posted course material for the 6.867 Machine Learning class online. They’ve listed lecture notes, assignments, projects, and exams.

The course will give the student the basic ideas and intuition behind modern machine learning methods as well as a bit more formal understanding of how, why, and when they work. The underlying theme in the course is statistical inference as it provides the foundation for most of the methods covered.

There are also notes for Machine Vision and Cognitive Robotics classes online.