Students from the American School of Bombay (ASB) won the Indian round of the Marine Advanced Technology Education (MATE) Underwater ROV competition and went on to compete in the finals of the international rounds in the USA. The event consisted of 38 competitions around the world leading to a final round.
The competition challenges K-12, community college, and university students from all over the world to design and build ROVs to tackle missions modeled after scenarios from the ocean workplace. Creating the underwater robots teaches science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) and prepares students for technical careers.
Held for the first time in India, the MATE regional rounds had ASB’s middle and elementary school students competing against high school and college-level teams from all over the country. The team, named ‘MantaRays,’ built a rover named ‘scraps’ literally from scraps with a very small budget.
The ASB students were a part of the Studio 6 project-based learning program, wherein the kids discussed, learned theories and practices related to propulsion and buoyancy for electrical, mechanical, ocean, and marine engineering.
Erik White, the lead mentor of the Studio 6 program at ASB said, “Finding the opportunities for all our students to be successful is paramount to ASB’s educational philosophy. The ‘MantaRays’, currently composed of Tyler Wiebusch, Jonah White, Yanis Pluess, Ryan Nene, Ayden Bhagwati, Mattea White, and Ani K, chose to take their learning beyond the Studio6 environment into real-world applications and extensions.”
The team faced difficulties in terms of design configurations, inability to obtain specific parts and a component issue that forced them to redesign the entire electronics and propulsion system 24 hours before the national stage of the competition.
The ‘scraps’ underwater rover used two programmed arduino mega microcontrollers that are capable of underwater video from three camera outputs, grabbing and picking up items with a mechanical arm, and six degrees of the freedom movement.
The team just got back from the competition that took place at the Kingsport Aquatics Center in Kingsport, Tennessee, USA.
Their journey, in just a few months, took them from a basic ROV build to a top-level competitor through continuous hard work, problem-solving, perseverance, and teamwork.
The team looks back on their Studio6 ‘scraps’ build and smiles at what seems like so long ago and all the iterations of learning and global experience that have raised the bar for themselves and others.