Throughout a summer season internship at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Ivy Mahncke, an undergraduate pupil 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 possibility to deal with new issues and cutting-edge algorithm improvement, 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 shortage of conventional localization aids — such because the World Positioning System, or GPS — in an underwater setting posed challenges for navigation that Mahncke and her mentors sought to beat. Her work within the laboratory culminated in area exams of the algorithm on an operational underwater car. Accompanying group workers to area 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 cut up off to go do different work. And he or she stated, ‘This is my laptop computer. Listed here are the issues that it’s essential 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 palms, 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 business.”
Says Madeline Miller, Mahncke’s internship supervisor: “Ivy’s internship coincided with a rigorous sequence of area 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 means to hit a number of attain objectives.”
Lincoln Laboratory’s summer research program runs from mid-Might to August. Functions are actually open.
Video by Tim Briggs/MIT Lincoln Laboratory | 2 minutes, 59 seconds
