Screenshot from video exhibiting underwater robotic automobile. Credit score: Tim Briggs/MIT Lincoln Laboratory.
Throughout a summer time internship at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Ivy Mahncke, an undergraduate scholar of robotics engineering at Olin School 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 sort out new issues and cutting-edge algorithm growth, Mahncke started an internship with Lincoln Laboratory’s Superior Undersea Programs and Know-how Group in 2025.
Mahncke spent the summer time creating and troubleshooting an algorithm that will assist a human diver and robotic automobile collaboratively navigate underwater. The shortage of conventional localization aids — such because the World 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 subject assessments of the algorithm on an operational underwater automobile. Accompanying group workers to subject check websites within the Atlantic Ocean, Charles River, and Lake Superior, Mahncke had the chance see her software program in motion in the true world.
“One of many lead engineers on the venture had break up off to go do different work. And he or she stated, ‘Right here’s my laptop computer. Listed below are the issues that you must 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 fingers, however as one of many lead subject testers,” Mahncke says. “I actually felt that my supervisors noticed me as the longer term technology 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 subject assessments on the finish of an formidable program. We figuratively threw her proper within the water, and she or he not solely floated, however performed an integral half in our program’s capability to hit a number of attain objectives.”
Lincoln Laboratory’s summer time analysis program runs from mid-Could to August. Functions at the moment are open.
Video by Tim Briggs/MIT Lincoln Laboratory | 2 minutes, 59 seconds
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