Screenshot from video exhibiting underwater robotic automobile. Credit score: Tim Briggs/MIT Lincoln Laboratory.
Throughout a summer season 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 growth, Mahncke started an internship with Lincoln Laboratory’s Superior Undersea Programs and Know-how Group in 2025.
Mahncke spent the summer season growing and troubleshooting an algorithm that may 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 surroundings posed challenges for navigation that Mahncke and her mentors sought to beat. Her work within the laboratory culminated in discipline checks of the algorithm on an operational underwater automobile. Accompanying group employees 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 actual world.
“One of many lead engineers on the mission had cut up off to go do different work. And she or he mentioned, ‘Right here’s my laptop computer. Listed here are the issues that you have to do. I belief you to go do them.’ And so I obtained to be out on the water as not simply an additional pair of arms, however as one of many lead discipline testers,” Mahncke says. “I actually felt that my supervisors noticed me as the long run 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 checks on the finish of an formidable 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 season analysis program runs from mid-Could to August. Purposes are actually open.
Video by Tim Briggs/MIT Lincoln Laboratory | 2 minutes, 59 seconds
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