Screenshot from video displaying underwater robotic car. Credit score: Tim Briggs/MIT Lincoln Laboratory.
Throughout a summer time internship at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Ivy Mahncke, an undergraduate pupil of robotics engineering at Olin Faculty of Engineering, took a hands-on method 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 prospect to deal with new issues and cutting-edge algorithm growth, Mahncke started an internship with Lincoln Laboratory’s Superior Undersea Techniques and Expertise Group in 2025.
Mahncke spent the summer time growing and troubleshooting an algorithm that will assist a human diver and robotic car 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 area exams of the algorithm on an operational underwater car. Accompanying group employees to area check 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 venture had cut up off to go do different work. And he or she mentioned, ‘Right here’s my laptop computer. Listed below are the issues that it is advisable 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 palms, however as one of many lead area 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 trade.”
Says Madeline Miller, Mahncke’s internship supervisor: “Ivy’s internship coincided with a rigorous sequence of area exams on the finish of an formidable program. We figuratively threw her proper within the water, and he or she not solely floated, however performed an integral half in our program’s potential to hit a number of attain targets.”
Lincoln Laboratory’s summer time 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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