The fifteenth RoboSub competition will be held in July 2012. The event is sponsored by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) and U.S. Office of Naval Research (ONR). The goal of this competition is to advance the development of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) by challenging a new generation of engineers to perform realistic missions in an underwater environment.

The rules and tasks of the competition change from year to year but the nature of the tasks remains the same. The competition is held in a big outdoor pool which is normally used by the Navy to test  underwater acoustics. The AUV solves the tasks without any outside help and it can not surface during a run. The vehicle uses data from cameras and sensors to navigate around the pool, to localize itself and to solve the tasks.

The competition course includes:

• Orange strips providing a direction to the next task
• Three buoys colored red, green and yellow which need to be touched in a predefined order.
• U shaped gate which the AUV needs to navigate through
• The AUV needs to drop a marker into the right box.
• Heartshaped form which the AUV needs shoot arrows through.
• The final task where the AUV needs to pick up a PVC structure and take to the surface.
  

Navigating between tasks is aided by the path strips. A pinger localization (follow-the-sound) is used to get to the final task.