Andrew Meares spoke at the chapter's September meeting on behalf of iBotics. iBotics is a nonprofit, student-run engineering group that focuses on research-based engineering projects. It has strong ties with the University of California, San Diego Jacob's School of Engineering. Meares discussed the group's project, called the Stingray--a compact, lightweight autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). The iBotics team entered the Stingray in the 2009 Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International and the Office of Naval Research Annual International AUV Competition. The group spent three years designing and building the AUV for the competition. The requirements are to develop a vehicle that is capable of completing a number of realistic underwater challenges that focus on navigation, vision, sonar and environment manipulation. At the conclusion of the competition, the iBotics team placed 12th out of 30 teams.