Why We Need Your Help to Build Guppy

Guppy is a brand-new autonomous submarine that our team, RoboSub of the Palouse, is designing and building to compete at RoboSub 2026. Guppy will use onboard AI to navigate and complete complex tasks in a controlled underwater course without any human communication.

We need your help to bring Guppy to life. Your support will give our team the materials and resources we need to design, build, and prepare for the competition on the international stage.

The Team Behind Guppy

After not competing since 2019 due to the pandemic, our team has quickly grown from just six members to more than 40 active students. With so many new people, we needed a way to get everyone ready to contribute to the submarine right away. To do that, we began hosting hands-on workshops covering every skill our members need.

Because of this training, every team member plays an active role in building Guppy. Some people design components of the body, some design circuit boards, others manufacture parts, and many work on programming its control systems. We design and manufacture many of our parts in house, and we build custom electronic boards that allow our submarine to operate independently in the water.

About the Competition

RoboSub 2026 is an international competition held in California where university teams from around the world build submarines to complete a series of challenging missions without any remote control from the teams.

Submarines get points by navigating through gates, picking up and transporting objects, shooting torpedoes at targets, dropping markers into bins, and interacting with underwater props. These tasks test the reliability of the submarine but also the quality of the team’s design, control systems, and software.

Guppy will face some of the best teams around, and your support helps ensure that Washington State University is ready to compete at that level.

Our Cause

To make this vision a reality, we need your help. This year, we’re launching a fundraising campaign to support the manufacturing and electronic assembling phase of our project.

Donations will directly fund:

• Materials like aluminum stock and acrylic water-tight housing
• Sensors and control system for real-time underwater navigation
• Circuit board fabrication
• In-house part manufacturing costs for precision-machined parts

Your support will help us finish Guppy’s core system before the spring semester, so that we can fully test, refine, and compete on the international stage in July 2026.

Impact

Our team is committed to giving students the practical skills and experience that they wouldn’t get from a lecture hall alone.

In just these past few months, we have already held workshops for SolidWorks fundamentals, CAD design best practices, control systems, design for 3D printers, CNC machining, soldering and crimping. These workshops give students the opportunity to learn relevant skills, work with professional tools, and contribute directly to a functioning autonomous submarine.

When donors support our team, they help provide the tools and materials that make these learning opportunities possible. Your gift empowers students to turn classroom knowledge into real engineering projects, build confidence in their abilities, and represent Washington State University on the international stage.