Featured video: Coding for underwater robotics | MIT Information

Throughout a summer season internship at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Ivy Mahncke, an undergraduate scholar of robotics engineering at Olin Faculty of Engineering, took a hands-on strategy 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 improvement, Mahncke started an internship with Lincoln Laboratory’s Superior Undersea Methods and Know-how Group in 2025. 

Mahncke spent the summer season creating and troubleshooting an algorithm that may assist a human diver and robotic car collaboratively navigate underwater. The dearth 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 exams of the algorithm on an operational underwater car. Accompanying group employees to subject 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 actual world.

“One of many lead engineers on the undertaking 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 worthwhile to 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 palms, however as one of many lead subject testers,” Mahncke says. “I actually felt that my supervisors noticed me as the longer term era 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 subject exams 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 targets.”

Lincoln Laboratory’s summer season analysis program runs from mid-Could to August. Functions are actually open. 

Video by Tim Briggs/MIT Lincoln Laboratory | 2 minutes, 59 seconds