Nessie floats to the top
In another outstanding performance, Nessie outshone seven competing teams to win the annual Student Autonomous Underwater Challenge – Europe (SAUC-E) and the £3,000 prize money sponsored by BAE Systems.
Heriot-Watt University's robot, 'Nessie', performed consistently throughout the two days of competition, performing a series of underwater tasks, including passing through gates without touching frames, parking inside a box and following a moving target. This year's event was held at QinetiQ's Ocean Basin in Haslar, Gosport, Europe's largest freshwater tank.
The competition is supported by UK and French MODs and open to student-led teams. It is designed to challenge a new generation of engineers to build a vehicle and perform realistic missions underwater. Dstl Judge Ben Evans was impressed with Nessie's abilities and the team's hard work: "The robot did nearly all the challenges and carried out far more of the underwater course than the others. Nessie has had a long period of development and some of the problems from previous years have now been overcome."
French team ENSIETA (Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Ingénieurs des Etudes et Techniques d'Armement) from Brest, Brittany, came second, with German team Avalon from the University of Bremen, third.
Haslar
The Ocean Basin at Haslar is the largest freshwater tank in Europe and is used to test the design and manoeuvrability of scale models of submarines and ships in different sea conditions. The tank is 120 x 60m and 5.5m deep, with a rotating arm with a maximum radius of 27.5m and speed of 0.6 rad/s.
The five element wavemaker can make regular and irregular waves. The flow field which includes the velocities, waves and pressure around a ship has been studied on model scale for over a century.
A facility sharing agreement has been negotiated with France for the UK to use the GTH cavitation tunnel at Val de Reuil, and for France to use the Ocean Basin at Haslar for submarine hydrodynamic and manoeuvring testing. Both nations have committed themselves with a Statement of Intent, signed at the UK-France summit in March 2008, to work towards signing a long-term legal agreement by 2009.