Riverside Enters the Fray

Riverside sits in stark contrast to the dense urban landscapes that surround it. It is a gem in the Inland Empire, a historic city where the Mission Inn calls home, a hotel that is over a hundred years old and has hosted such renowned guests as Ronald Reagan, Teddy Roosevelt, and Andrew Carnegie.

Away from the bustling downtown streets that run past the Mission Inn, engineers in the Bourns College of Engineering at the University of California Riverside form the first team to compete in RoboSub, an annual international competition sponsored by the United States Navy where students design and build autonomous underwater vehicles to complete a series of visual and acoustic based tasks.

Scrappy and Full of Heart

Building an autonomous submarine no easy feat. Forming a team from scratch to design, engineer, and develop said submarine is no easier. Fulfilling both aforementioned objectives with minimal funding makes their completion even more difficult. But it also builds character, and where Team Seagoat lacks sponsors it has an abundance of ingenuity and determination.

The team is comprised of undergraduate students from the IEEE student branch at UCR, and consists of students majoring in mechanical, electrical, and computer engineering at the Bourns College of Engineering. The team is further divided into three subteams: mechanical, electrical, and embedded.

The team roster is as follows:

• Embedded
  • Andrew Olguin
  • Ke Jing
• Electrical
  • Marco Rubio
  • Adam Anunciation
• Mechanical
  • Steven Herzberg
  • James Loung
  • Raymond Lo
  • Kevin Tang
  • Jeremiah Ailes
• Online presence:
  • David Alexander Foster
• Contributors:
  • Kevin Ortega
  • Keith Nishimura
  • Joseph Rubio

Team Seagoat’s mission for RoboSub 2016 is to raise interest at the University of California Riverside in autonomous vehicles and lay the groundwork for students in future years to become more competitive in RoboSub tournaments.

A Seagoat is Born

Knowing full well the trials the team faced, it seemed to them more appropriate to name and design their team and submarine after one of the stranger, more interesting mythical sea creatures. The robotic submarine UCR develops in 2020 will be a technological feat: it will place 1st place in that year’s competition, and it will have an epic name like The Kraken it will so fittingly deserve. For the 2016 competition, however, Seagoat is a fitting name for the AUV the team will produce.

Learn more about Seagoat, the first autonomous submarine developed at the University of California Riverside.