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Student Autonomous Underwater Challenge - Europe

Student Autonomous Underwater Challenge - Europe

Alex Ridge, Simon Calcutt, Sunil Shah, Paul Esparon (Team Captain), Oliver Hughes, Richard Mathie, Andy Pritchard

The Student Autonomous Underwater Challenge - Europe (SAUC-E) is a competition for students from across Europe to design and build Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV) to attempt an underwater assault course.

It is definitely a beneficial part of our engineering degree, we learned how to work on an engineering project against all adversity and set backs which is a vital skill that sets any student who undertakes such a challenging project a cut above the rest.

Paul Esparon

The course varies from year to year but can consist of gates, drop targets, surface zones, and many other obstacles. The aim is to advance the state of the art of AUV technology and the competition provides opportunity for students to gain industrial links.

This is the first year Cambridge has competed in the SAUC-E competition and the team have won second prize. This is a fantastic achievement for an undergraduate student team, mostly first years, Paul Esparon, Richard Mathie, Alex Ridge, Simon Calcutt, Sunil Shah, Oliver Hughes and Andy Pritchard all of whom have no prior experience of autonomy or underwater vehicles. As the team said "A most significant factor in our success was the generous donations from our sponsors Sentec, Qinetiq and IET without which there would be no team."

The team gained an enormous amount of real life engineering experience, putting ideas into practice, and they all thoroughly enjoyed the event. Paul Esparon project director of the team said, "It is definitely a beneficial part of our engineering degree, we learned how to work on an engineering project against all adversity and set backs which is a vital skill that sets any student who undertakes such a challenging project a cut above the rest."

The event was four days long. The first two days were practise and time to make last minute adjustments to the AUV. The third day was qualifying and the fourth day the finals. Points are awarded based on the final run, technical documentation, presentations and innovation. There was plenty of socialising with the other teams from the different universities in the evenings.

The competition will be held in Brest, France next year and the team are enthusiastic about recruiting more members to the team. The current team have already begun new designs for 2008 and have already attracted the attention of Oxford University who are rumoured to be attending.

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