The Underwater Robotics Club was started in the fall of 2004 by Electrical and Computer Engineering undergraduates at NC State. Each year, the team builds a robot and attends the RoboSub Competition. The team's competitive members spend time outside of the classroom developing technical and professional engineering skills. The club is self-run and offers students many opportunities for leadership. Many club members have acquired highly technical jobs and/or attended graduate school. Large defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman have hired NC State Underwater Robotics Club members due to their teamwork and experience which is set apart from other students.

During its first year, the club worked with a local robotics company to build Seawolf I, for the 2005 RoboSub Competition in San Diego. Seawolf I, could perform acrobatic tricks like flips, barrel rolls and spins and turned many heads at the competition.

Seawolf I was featured in several magazines including Robot Magazine, Make Magazine, and Servo. Unfortunately, Seawolf I suffered electrical problems during the last days of practice and was unable to qualify for the final competition round.

A year later in 2005, the team went back to the drawing board to develop Seawolf II. Borrowing many of the innovative features of Seawolf I, Seawolf II was lighter, simpler to operate, and has a number of new features aimed at improving reliability.

Seawolf II debuted at the 2006 AUVSI competition. Seawolf II ranked 9th place overall out of 21 teams, and ranked 3rd in craftsmanship. After making several improvements to this vehicle over the 2006-2007 school year, the team brought Seawolf II to the AUVSI competition for its second time in 2007.

In 2008, Seawolf II appeared for her final competition year. The club utilized Saxo boards containing an FPGA and microcontroller to be the brain of Seawolf II's body.

In 2009, the team debuted Seawolf III. Seawolf III has a much simpler design and is very well outfitted to complete tasks for the competition. Seawolf III features 8020 aluminum framing, a Lenovo netbook, and new software architecture dubbed "libseawolf." Seawolf III has been a great modular and flexible platform for the team for 2009 and 2010.

The team now stands in its 7th year of operation in 2011 with a dedicated team. With continuous RoboSub Competition placment improvements over the past three years (31st, 16th, 9th), the club has much to maintain in 2011.

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