Two University of Florida teams earned top honors and a combined $35,000 in awards at the Mission Autonomy Hackathon, a national competition hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
The five-day October event in brought together more than 100 engineering students from universities across the country to tackle real-world autonomous-systems challenges. Teams worked through scenarios involving drone reconnaissance, disaster response, maritime monitoring and other mission-based operations, using AWS cloud tools, edge artificial intelligence/machine learning (ML) robotics and simulation environments.
The UF team called What Are You Doing in My Swamp won first place overall and a $25,000 prize for building a multi-submarine coordination system capable of sharing position, orientation and contact data between underwater vehicles and the cloud in real time. The team also developed a dashboard to monitor submarine movement as new data streamed in.
“When we arrived, none of us had experience with AWS services, but through rapid learning and teamwork we built a distributed architecture from the ground up,” noted team leader Sanat Konda in a LinkedIn post. “It was a true team effort, and every member played a key role in bringing the system to life.”
UF’s AutoGators team earned the Most Innovative Solution award and a $10,000 prize. Their project focused on protecting a moving convoy by using autonomous aerial drones to detect threats through imagery and reroute vehicles with minimal delay.
Organizers evaluated submissions based on technical accuracy, creativity, integration strategy and the ability to scale solutions beyond the competition environment. Faculty said UF’s strong showing underscored the students’ ability to move quickly from conceptual design to a functioning prototype while working under intense time constraints.
“UF engineering students learn to work in integrated, cross-disciplinary teams, and their success at this hackathon reflects the strength of that approach,” said Ivan Ruchkin, Ph.D., an assistant professor in UF’s Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering. “These awards show the excellent skills and talent our students bring to autonomy and robotics, and I’m excited to see what they achieve next.”
Students from both teams credit their performance to tight collaboration, fast learning and support from UF mentors and AWS engineers. Many of the participants entered the hackathon with little-to-no experience using AWS platforms but quickly learned as they built and tested their systems.
The results continue UF’s track record of success in national autonomy and robotics competitions and reflect the College of Engineering’s emphasis on hands-on, interdisciplinary preparation for emerging fields such as cloud-integrated robotics, embedded computing and autonomous systems.