Screenshot from video exhibiting underwater robotic car. Credit score: Tim Briggs/MIT Lincoln Laboratory.
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 prospect to deal with new issues and cutting-edge algorithm growth, Mahncke started an internship with Lincoln Laboratory’s Superior Undersea Programs and Expertise Group in 2025.
Mahncke spent the summer season growing 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 International 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 area assessments of the algorithm on an operational underwater car. Accompanying group employees to area 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 challenge had break up off to go do different work. And he or she mentioned, ‘Right here’s my laptop computer. Listed here are the issues that it’s good to do. I belief you to go do them.’ And so I acquired 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 era 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 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 means to hit a number of attain targets.”
Lincoln Laboratory’s summer season 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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