Students to Compete in Underwater Robotics Competition
The Marine
Advanced Technology Education (MATE) Center's 15th annual international
student underwater robotics competition will kick off
June 23 at the NASA Johnson Space Center's Neutral Buoyancy Lab in
Houston.
The
competition challenges students at all levels — K-12, community college
and
university — to design and build remote operated vehicles (ROVs),
robots, to
accomplish underwater tasks.
MATE's
goal is to encourage students to learn and apply science, technology,
engineering and math (STEM) skills, particularly in an effort to
prepare them
for the future workforce for ocean occupations.
Throughout
the school year, teams at all grade levels have worked to develop
dual-purpose
single-launch ROVs that can operate in the deepest oceans and harshest
outer
space environments. Using NASA's Neutral Buoyancy Lab — the world's
largest
indoor pool at 202 feet long, 102 feet wide and 40 feet deep — the
teams will
have their ROVs conduct a number of tasks.
In the
ocean-themed missions, students will use their ROVs to turn a
decommissioned
oil rig into an artificial reef and collect oil samples and coral
specimens. The
space-based missions challenge the teams to pilot their ROVs under the
ice
sheet of Jupiter's moon Europa to collect data.
Teams
from around the world participated in 26 regional competitions before
70 were
selected to compete in the international event. Each team will be
evaluated by
a panel of judges from the ocean and space industries on design,
construction
and performance.
MATE is
a national partnership of organizations working to improve marine
technical
education, headquartered at Monterey
Peninsula College in Monterey, CA, and is funded
as a National
Science Foundation (NSF) Advanced
Technological Education (ATE) Center of
Excellence.
About the Author
Michael Hart is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer and the former executive editor of THE Journal.