The Caltech Effect: Caltech Wins First Prize in International Robotics Competition

Dory, Caltech’s prizewinning robot submarine, was built by an industrious team of undergraduate students at the California Institute of Technology. Dory outperformed dozens of other autonomous underwater vehicles in the 2016 International RoboSub Competition, which is hosted annually by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing unmanned systems and robotics technologies.

The robots in this competition are completely autonomous, meaning no remote controls are used. Each relies on a built-in computer, sensors, and camera to navigate an obstacle course and complete tasks such as hitting buoys, dropping markers into bins, locating an acoustic pinger underwater, and firing torpedoes. (Caltech’s Dory elected to not fire her torpedoes—either because she’s a pacifist or because she decided the amount of time it would have taken wasn’t worth the point value assigned to the task.)

In this video, Caltech Robotics co-founder Justin Koch (BS ’15) joins current team members Julia Deacon (class of 2019) and Jake Larson (class of 2017) to talk about the challenges of building Dory, her distinctive personality, and the thrill of the competition. With Joel Burdick, Caltech’s Richard L. and Dorothy M. Hayman Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Bioengineering, as faculty adviser, Caltech Robotics receives support from a variety of individual and corporate donors—including Koch, Sam Barnett (BS ’12) and SBB Research Group, Rhonda MacDonald (BS ’74), Northrup Grumman, Thales Avionics, and VideoRay—who provide hardware donations and funding as well as design advice.

Caltech Robotics is just one of many extracurricular clubs that thrive thanks in large part to philanthropy. Visit breakthrough.caltech.edu to learn how Break Through: The Caltech Campaign is supporting Caltech scholars and their discoveries and inventions.

Produced in association with Caltech Academic Media Technologies. ©2017 California Institute of Technology