Expanding below the waterline.
RobotX 2026 marks AAV’s expansion into the underwater domain. After building experience with aerial and surface systems, the team is now preparing a three domain maritime fleet across UAV, USV, and UUV operations.
This campaign adds underwater integration, UUV task coordination, acoustics, operator supervision and multi vehicle mission planning.
Strengthening the aerial branch.
RobotX 2024 used the UAV mainly as a maritime support drone. It worked with the USV, handled small item transfer between floating platforms, and supported search and reporting tasks.
SUAS 2025 changed the role of the aircraft. UAV 2.0 had to operate as a full aerial mission platform, with autonomous waypoint flight, longer route coverage, aerial mapping, ground object detection, geolocation, payload drop accuracy, mission planning, local processing and runway style take off.
The campaign helped AAV move from a support drone toward a more complete aerial autonomy system. Those upgrades now feed into UAV development for RobotX 2026.
A first campaign under the AAV name.
RobotX 2024 was AAV’s first campaign under the Archimedes Autonomous Vehicles name. The team competed with USV 1.0 and UAV 1.0, learning how to operate a maritime robotics system under international competition pressure.
The campaign tested far more than the vehicles. It tested shipment planning, legal documentation, cargo handling, system integration, on site repair, software iteration and coordination across a young team with limited prior RobotX experience.
The result gave AAV its strongest RobotX performance in years and became the foundation for the 2026 rebuild.
Simulation success before the rebuild.
VRX is the simulation based counterpart to the Maritime RobotX Challenge. It gave AAV a software first competition environment where the team developed autonomous maritime logic in Gazebo before returning to physical competition campaigns.
The 2022 campaign showed the team’s strength in simulation, ranking improvement, video submission and open source contribution. It also helped build the software culture needed for later RobotX work.
