Underwater "Black Box" Localization

In the early days of aviation, downed planes were deemed tragedies and nothing more. Unless the pilot survived the crash, there would be no way to investigate the crash, and even still there was little way to diagnose what went wrong on a technical level. That was, until the 1960's when "Black Box" flight recorders became standard. The idea being that even if a plane crashed, investigators could retrieve the black box and observe the recorded data to determine what caused the crash. Most recently, in the 737 Max crashes in both Ethiopia and Indonesia were crucial in determining the faulty data being observed by the MCAS system that ultimately downed both planes. As a result, numerous resources are devoted to locating a downed black box. When a plane goes down in water, the Black box will emit an ultrasonic pulse in order to aid recovery efforts. Often, these recovery efforts are resource intensive and entirely operated by manned ships.

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However, research is being done to find an alternative way to locate the black box. One potential solution is the use of autonomous vehicles. One competition looking to push the envelope is the RoboNation RoboBoat competition. One subtask within the competition it to determine to the location of a simulated Black box by docking at the location of an ultrasonic pinger. UM::Autonomy, the University of Michigan's autonomous boat engineering build team, is a participant in the competition and is in the process of building a system to determine the location of a black box.