Matthew D. Hancher

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The MIT ORCA 1

Tags: autonomous, mit, orca, robots

This is the ORCA 1, which was my first forray into serious robotics. Project ORCA was the codename for the MIT Autonomous Underwater Vehicles Team, and I was lucky enough to be a founding member of the team during the spring of 1998. I did much of the system programming for our subs, appropriately named ORCA, for the first three years.

ORCA’s primary mission was to compete in the AUVSI and ONR’s annual International AUV Competitions, and that first year the ORCA-1 took first place. We even got Slashdotted. The whole experience pretty much solidified my excitement about robotics and shaped the rest of my time at MIT.

After ORCA 1 came ORCA 2!