Screenshot from video displaying 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 possibility to deal with new issues and cutting-edge algorithm improvement, Mahncke started an internship with Lincoln Laboratory’s Superior Undersea Programs and Know-how Group in 2025.
Mahncke spent the summer time growing and troubleshooting an algorithm that may 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 setting posed challenges for navigation that Mahncke and her mentors sought to beat. Her work within the laboratory culminated in area checks of the algorithm on an operational underwater automobile. 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 she or he stated, ‘Right here’s my laptop computer. Listed here are the issues that it’s essential do. I belief you to go do them.’ And so I bought to be out on the water as not simply an additional pair of palms, however as one of many lead area testers,” Mahncke says. “I actually felt that my supervisors noticed me as the long run 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 sequence of area checks 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 capacity to hit a number of attain objectives.”
Lincoln Laboratory’s summer time analysis program runs from mid-Could to August. Purposes at the moment are open.
Video by Tim Briggs/MIT Lincoln Laboratory | 2 minutes, 59 seconds
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