Beaver’s robotics team—BeaverAUV—traveled to Irvine, California this summer for RoboSub 2024, an international student competition focused on designing and building robotic submarines. Throughout the year, teams prepare for the event by building and testing their experimental AUVs (Autonomous Underwater Vehicles). The competition is comprised mostly of college and university teams, with Beaver as one of only four high school teams competing.
In the competition, each student-designed-and-built robot must complete a difficult series of visual and acoustic-based tasks. Teams sign up for times slots throughout the early part of the week in order to qualify for the finals. After some trial and error, BeaverAUV qualified for a wild card spot in the semi-finals, where they would eventually end their run. Throughout the process, the BeaverAUV team learned a lot and even collaborated with other teams, building community around a shared interest in robotics and STEM.
Below, team members Andre Gordon ’26 and Sam Steere ’26 share their experiences from RoboSub 2024 and reflect on the competition.
What made you want to get involved with BeaverAUV?
Andre: I originally wanted to get involved with BeaverAUV because of a suggestion from Zoz; I was already getting into more advanced programming projects, and he convinced me to try working on robotics projects. There was nobody else on the team who knew software at that point, so I took on the role and have kept working on it since.
Sam: I got involved with BeaverAUV my freshman year when a fellow team member and friend of mine, Andre, decided to ask Zoz about the shell of our sub that was just sitting out in the D Level.
I thought it would be a really cool and unique project to be a part of, especially because I was and still am interested in mechanical engineering.
-Sam Steere ’26
How did the competition go?
Andre: The competition went well! It was really interesting to see all the different teams and how many different possible sub designs there are. It was also pretty stressful, just considering how much we had to do and how many issues came up.
Sam: We took a solid step forward in the competition this year, which is why I would say that the competition went fairly well overall for our team. I enjoyed the competition a lot, and I had a lot of fun watching our sub and other teams’ subs in action, as well as hanging out with the rest of our team. For me at least, the competition was also a little bit stressful, because of problems popping up at the last minute that we had to rush to fix. I was never completely overwhelmed though, I just wanted the team to do well.
What is something you will take away from this entire experience?
Andre: Preparation is really important! We ended up having a lot of issues because we didn’t do enough work over the year, so a big point for us this year is to not just work on the sub but also maintain it and test for potential issues that might pop up; we don’t want another situation where we find a big problem at the competition.
Sam: I will definitely take away the importance of communication, organization, and planning throughout the year and during the competition. It took me experiencing the competition for the first time this year to realize the importance of these three categories, but they will definitely be marked down as areas for improvement next year.
BeaverAUV plans to return to RoboSub next summer. By building upon the experiences from this year, the team is hopeful they will make it even further into the robotic submarine competition. To stay updated on all things BeaverAUV, check out the BeaverAUV Instagram page, run by the team.