Throughout a summer time internship at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Ivy Mahncke, an undergraduate scholar of robotics engineering at Olin Faculty of Engineering, took a hands-on strategy to testing algorithms for underwater navigation. She first found her love for working with underwater robotics as an intern on the Woods Gap Oceanographic Establishment in 2024. Drawn by the possibility to deal with new issues and cutting-edge algorithm improvement, Mahncke started an internship with Lincoln Laboratory’s Superior Undersea Programs and Know-how Group in 2025.
Mahncke spent the summer time creating and troubleshooting an algorithm that might assist a human diver and robotic automobile collaboratively navigate underwater. The shortage of conventional localization aids — such because the International Positioning System, or GPS — in an underwater atmosphere posed challenges for navigation that Mahncke and her mentors sought to beat. Her work within the laboratory culminated in discipline assessments of the algorithm on an operational underwater automobile. Accompanying group workers to discipline take a look at websites within the Atlantic Ocean, Charles River, and Lake Superior, Mahncke had the chance see her software program in motion in the true world.
“One of many lead engineers on the undertaking had cut up off to go do different work. And she or he mentioned, ‘This is my laptop computer. Listed below are the issues that you want to do. I belief you to go do them.’ And so I acquired to be out on the water as not simply an additional pair of palms, however as one of many lead discipline testers,” Mahncke says. “I actually felt that my supervisors noticed me as the longer term era of engineers, both at Lincoln Lab or simply within the broader business.”
Says Madeline Miller, Mahncke’s internship supervisor: “Ivy’s internship coincided with a rigorous sequence of discipline assessments on the finish of an bold program. We figuratively threw her proper within the water, and she or he not solely floated, however performed an integral half in our program’s capacity to hit a number of attain targets.”
Lincoln Laboratory’s summer time analysis program runs from mid-Might to August. Purposes at the moment are open.
Video by Tim Briggs/MIT Lincoln Laboratory | 2 minutes, 59 seconds
