Troy High School NJROTC
SPEAR
Student-built autonomous underwater vehicles for the RoboNation RoboSub competition.
Our Mission
Engineering autonomous underwater vehicles from the ground up.
SPEAR is Troy High School's NJROTC underwater robotics team. We design, build, and program fully autonomous submarines to compete in the annual RoboNation RoboSub competition, tackling challenges in mechanical engineering, computer vision, and control systems.
Years competing
Team members
Sub-teams
Vehicles built
RoboSub 2026
What we're doing in the competition
RoboSub, run by RoboNation, challenges student teams to build submarines that complete an underwater course with no human control. Once our vehicle is in the pool, it has to find gates, bins, and targets on its own, then pick up objects, drop markers, and fire torpedoes to score points. Our 2026 entry is ORCA.
See
Two ZED 2i stereo cameras and a YOLO26 model find each task and measure how far away it is.
Decide
A behavior tree on the Jetson Orin Nano picks the next action from the mission plan and what the cameras see.
Act
A Pixhawk drives the thrusters, while a compliant claw, marker dropper, and electric torpedo handle the tasks.
ORCA
Redesigned claw, dropper, and torpedo, a safer power system with a hard kill switch, and camera-based localization that replaced last year's DVL.
- Computer
- Jetson Orin Nano
- Cameras
- 2x ZED 2i stereo
- Software
- ROS 2 + YOLO26
- Tools
- Claw, dropper, torpedo
Supported By
RoboSub 2026
Congrats Team!