Nineteen teams went in and only nine — including Virginia Tech’s own DEEP-X — came out of the first round of a global competition to build autonomous vehicles that can rapidly map the mostly unknown ocean floor.
The DEEP-X team, led by Dan Stilwell, professor of electrical and computer engineering and director of the Virginia Tech Center for Marine Autonomy and Robotics, has earned a finalist spot in the second and final round of the $7 Million Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE.
The international competition intends to spur the development of cutting-edge autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) that can quickly capture high-resolution maps of the ocean floor, the surface of which is less understood than that of Venus or Mars.
By developing technology capable of such ambitious goals, researchers can unlock data that paints a bigger picture of the Earth’s climate and the biological life and landscapes deep below the ocean surface.