Throughout a summer season 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 possibility to deal with new issues and cutting-edge algorithm improvement, Mahncke started an internship with Lincoln Laboratory’s Superior Undersea Techniques and Expertise Group in 2025.
Mahncke spent the summer season creating and troubleshooting an algorithm that might assist a human diver and robotic car collaboratively navigate underwater. The dearth of conventional localization aids — such because the International Positioning System, or GPS — in an underwater setting posed challenges for navigation that Mahncke and her mentors sought to beat. Her work within the laboratory culminated in area assessments of the algorithm on an operational underwater car. Accompanying group workers to area take a look at 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 challenge had break up off to go do different work. And he or she mentioned, ‘This is my laptop computer. Listed below are the issues that it’s essential to do. I belief you to go do them.’ And so I received to be out on the water as not simply an additional pair of fingers, however as one of many lead area 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 business.”
Says Madeline Miller, Mahncke’s internship supervisor: “Ivy’s internship coincided with a rigorous collection of area assessments 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 skill to hit a number of attain targets.”
Lincoln Laboratory’s summer season analysis program runs from mid-Might to August. Functions are actually open.
Video by Tim Briggs/MIT Lincoln Laboratory | 2 minutes, 59 seconds