Maritime RobotX Challenge
Competition History
From the harbors of Singapore to the Pacific waters off Hawaii, Team Minion has represented Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in the world's most demanding autonomous maritime competitions.
About the Maritime RobotX Challenge
The Maritime RobotX Challenge is organized jointly by the AUVSI Foundation and the Office of Naval Research. It challenges university teams from across the globe to develop autonomous surface vehicles capable of completing a series of open-water tasks without human intervention. These tasks test perception, navigation, planning, manipulation, and inter-vehicle coordination, all under real maritime conditions with wind, waves, current, and sun glare.
Competition tasks have included autonomous navigation through gates, identifying and classifying colored buoys, detecting underwater acoustic pingers, delivering objects to designated targets, and deploying subvehicles for close-range inspection. Each competition cycle introduces new task variants that push teams to develop more capable perception and planning systems.
Unlike indoor or controlled-environment robotics competitions, RobotX takes place in open water with full maritime hazards. Vehicles must handle wave motion, saltwater corrosion, GPS multipath near shore structures, and communications dropouts. This operational reality forces teams to build systems that are not merely clever in simulation but robust enough to survive contact with the ocean. Our Minion platform was designed from day one with this reality in mind.
Challenge Categories
Competition Tasks
Autonomous Navigation
Navigate through a sequence of gates defined by colored buoys without human input. Requires precision GPS, current compensation, and real-time path planning to handle drift and changing conditions.
Object Detection & Classification
Identify, classify, and report the color, shape, and position of floating objects using computer vision and LiDAR fusion. Algorithms must work under variable lighting and sea state.
Underwater Pinger Detection
Locate acoustic pingers placed on the sea floor using hydrophone arrays and signal processing. Bearing and range estimation must account for surface reflections and ambient noise.
Detect and Deliver
Identify a target platform and deliver racquetballs using a pneumatic launcher. The actively stabilized gimbal system must compensate for wave-induced platform motion during targeting.
Subvehicle Deployment
Deploy and recover an autonomous subvehicle to inspect underwater targets. Requires coordinated communication between mothership and subvehicle through unstable RF links.
Docking and Station Keeping
Approach and dock with a fixed platform, then hold position within a defined tolerance for a set duration. Tests low-speed control precision and disturbance rejection in current.
Results and Milestones
Our Competition Record
RobotX Singapore — Inaugural Entry
Team Minion fields its first Maritime RobotX Challenge entry, competing against teams from Asia, Australia, and the Americas. The team gains critical open-water testing data that reshapes the next vehicle iteration.
RoboBoat — First Place
Embry-Riddle wins the AUVSI Foundation RoboBoat competition, demonstrating autonomous navigation and obstacle avoidance capabilities that form the software foundation for the RobotX platform.
RoboBoat — Back-to-Back Championship
A second consecutive RoboBoat victory validates the team's modular platform approach and establishes Embry-Riddle as a leader in autonomous maritime systems at the collegiate level.
RobotX Hawaii — Major Platform Upgrade
Team Minion returns to RobotX with a rebuilt perception suite, the Lackey subvehicle, and the Bodyguard racquetball delivery system. The modular rail system debuts, enabling rapid sensor reconfiguration in the field.
RobotX Hawaii — Next-Generation Minion
A modernized Minion platform competes with upgraded computing hardware, refined hull geometry, and improved autonomous mission planning for multi-task execution under time pressure.
Lessons from Competition
Every competition cycle teaches the team something that no textbook or simulation can replicate. In Singapore, the team learned that saltwater intrusion through a single unsealed connector could disable an entire sensor bus mid-run. In Hawaii, they discovered that LiDAR returns from breaking waves could trigger false obstacle detections that caused unnecessary evasive maneuvers. Each failure was cataloged, root-caused, and fed back into the design of the next vehicle.
This iterative process has produced a team culture that values thorough testing and honest post-mortem analysis over optimistic assumptions. Students who go through a full competition cycle graduate with a visceral understanding of what it means to build systems that must work in uncontrolled environments, an experience that distinguishes them in industry interviews and in their early careers. Read more about the Minion platform's subsystems on our Boat Overview page, or learn about the team members who make it all happen.
Watch Us Compete
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