ENVI-UUV wants an NVIDIA GPU

Hi! We are the "Mesa College MATLAB Club", a student organization dedicated to promoting STEM education at San Diego Mesa College. Please watch the video above or visit our team's website  to learn more about our team!


Mesa College MATLAB Club has a software focus on Machine Learning algorithms which we compete annually at the AUVSI Foundation's RoboSub Competition. 

At this very moment, our robotics team is anxiously waiting to conduct several Math and Computer Science experiments which require a high performance computer to run... 


Unfortunately: at $0.65/hr the cost of purchasing GPU time from cloud service providers has cost our team nearly $300 this year. To more efficiently conserve our resources, we've determined it is necessary to in-house our IT infrastructure, and purchase the necessary equipment rather than continue to rent. 

Through donations, we have so far been able to source a 1250W PSU, 16GB of RAM, and a 4.1GHz 8-core AMD CPU, however: we still need a powerful CUDA 7+ capable GPU in order to quickly iterate through tests.

A high performance GPU should help us generate extremely competitive results which we believe will generalize well at competition!

For us, this GoFundMe Campaign represents the beginning of our 2017 Fundraising year. We're proud to share with you some of our results which were made possible by student effort and the money we raised from last year:


We strongly believe in this research work we're doing. Specifically, we're trying to creating an autonomous vehicle powered entirely through machine learning!

Our Team's Award-Winning Research Poster
Our 2016 RoboSub Competition Journal Paper
To help move progress forward:
 We published this machine learning dataset: "SimBox 2015"!

Unfortunately: we had to pause our research shortly after making this video:

We do what we can to finance our team with fundraising to remove the financial burden on students, making access to education opportunities available regardless of our member's individual financial situations.


What we're looking for is a modern NVIDIA Graphics Card:


Specifically, any one of the following:
GTX 960, 970, 980, 1060,1070,1080

However our "stretch-goal" is a ASUS GeForce 12GB GTX TITAN X:

Last month: our team presented our 2016 efforts to a panel of judges from the Office of Naval Research!


We all worked extremely hard at this year's 2016 RoboSub competition to establish our team's brand, and demonstrate the necessary competency to inspire confidence in potential sponsors such as yourself.


Thanks to financial donations from Coleman University, ENVI, Mesa College ASG, and the Interclub Council at Mesa College: we cleared our first major hurdle with a respectable performance(ranking TBA) at this year's competition with only $5,500 in seed capital!

After an intense several weeks of non-stop work: we now have 48 weeks to prepare for the 2017 competition. I'm hoping that your generosity today will be an incredible first step towards making this an AMAZING & productive year!


If you find our work inspirational and believe you can help us accomplish our first quarter fundraising target of $2,500: please consider giving a donation to promote STEM education and career-ready skills for San Diego students!