The pandemic very nearly sunk Carnegie Mellon University's robotic submarine team.

But a group of first-year students — most of them from the School of Computer Science — righted the ship again last fall and captured third place this summer at the RoboSub 2022 international student competition.

"Getting exposed to robotics is something that we were all super interested in doing," said Sarah Fisher, a computational biology major and member of the team. "Most of us hadn't had much of an opportunity to work in robotics during high school. We learned a bunch about integrating mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and software engineering all in one type of system, and we had a lot of fun solving the sorts of problems that are unique to the field of underwater robotics."

In 2019, the newly formed Tartan Autonomous Underwater Vehicle team (TartanAUV) competed for the first time at the RoboSub competition, placing 29th. But then COVID-19 struck. The 2020 RoboSub contest was canceled and the 2021 contest went virtual, with no in-person competition.

By fall 2021, all the original TartanAUV members had graduated, except two seniors in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE): Tom Scherlis and Rishabh Jain. That might have been the end of the team if not for first-year computer science (CS) major Katerina Nikiforova.

While reading about RoboSub, she happened to see a reference to TartanAUV. She then contacted Scherlis and gathered a group of CS friends to meet with him. The team was thus relaunched, with Scherlis and Jain sticking around as mentors. In addition to Fisher and Nikiforova, the new first-year team members included CS majors Theodore Chemel, Samuel Schaub and Micah Reich; and ECE major Rylan Morgan.

In 2020 and 2021, the team began work on a new sub, Kingfisher, with the help of Leidos, an engineering company and the team's main sponsor. The team took fifth place in the 2021 design competition and had machined many of the sub's parts. The newly constituted team then assembled the sub and turned it into a functional system.

In the competition, Kingfisher needed to perform a number of underwater tasks autonomously, such as dropping markers on particular sites, shooting torpedoes through designated tubes and surfacing within an octagonal area. The team tested Kingfisher on Friday mornings in the Cohon University Center swimming pool. They also had access to the Field Robotics Center tank in Newell-Simon Hall, but the metal tank caused problems for the sensors used to track the vehicle's trajectories.

Forty student teams competed at RoboSub this summer at the University of Maryland. The National University of Singapore placed first, followed by Amador Valley High School from Pleasanton, California. At third place, TartanAUV outpaced all other U.S. universities, including Cornell, The Ohio State University, the University of Michigan, Duke and New York University.

Fisher said the team members are "super committed" to continuing in the competition.

"Our goal is to grow our team, get more people involved and make sure it can last beyond our class of 2025," she said.