an alumnus of st columbas school delhi and a finalyear engineering student of brigham young university hawaii campus in the us anuj sehgal with the assistance of one of his fellow student has developed a lowcost autonomous underwater vehicle or luv the luv was selected to participate in the seventhinternational automatedunderwater vehicle competition held at san diego california us the luv emerged winners in the lightest smallest and cheapest workable automatedunderwater vehicle category in the same competitionexcerpts on an interviewexplain the idea behind developing a lowcost autonomousunderwater robotin recent years autonomous underwater vehicles auvs have become popular owing to their ability to operate underwater without human intervention improving the efficiency while extending its operating range and time as such our aim was to develop a lowcost auv so as to improve adoption of automated underwater submersibles in industry and academia the goal was to produce an auv that would be low cost easily serviceable lightweight and task independenthow did you go about pursuing the project with your partner kadarusman from indonesia what kind of support did you receive from your faculty and the universitythe university administration was extremely enthusiastic about our idea and gave us a free hand towards purchase of equipment our aim though was not to use more than 600 for the project like most computer scientists we viewed the problem as being a virtual one and thus designed the software aspect of it within a few days the lack of experience knowledge and mounting deadlines added a lot of pressure which resulted in many hours of researchbeing the first project of this magnitude in the department the faculty was inexperienced as well if we had any basic conceptual queries the faculty was helpful but in case of specific auvrelated problems we relied on previous researchhow was the experience and competing against some of the top teams at the competition at san diego californiathis experience has been one of the most rewarding experiences i have had all my life robotics has been my chosen field of specialisation since completing high school at st columbas school new delhi and this one project has reinforced my interestwhat are your future career planspresently i intend to further my research in artificial intelligence i intend to pursue a ph d in robotics too i have been offered a position at brigham young universityhawaii for the moment i intend to pursue this job for a year and work on an auv for next year as well