Team Name/ Home Blue Hills Technical High, Canton, MA NYC Home Educators Assoc., New York, NY Milton Academy, Milton, MA Diman Regional Technical Vocational HS Fall River, MA Rogers High School Newport, RI MAST 1 Deception Sandy Hook, NJ Cambridge Rindge Latin School Cambridge, MA MATES* New London, CT BMC Durfee High School Fall River, MA Southeastern VoTech High School Easton, MA Bristol Community College Fall River, MA MAST 2 Autobot Sandy Hook, NJ The Sound School New Haven, CT Weaver High School Hartford, CT
Total Score
358.1
350.5
341.5
299.5
299.1
266.2
235
179
168.3
165.3
165
153.2 142
126.9
Blue Hills Regional Technical School ROV team place first. (L to R) Jeremy Kahm, Eric Winters, Ernie Vayshan and their mentor.
(Photo Credit:Maggie L. Merrill, Marine Marketing Services)
vehicle more often in water. For some teams, the competition at MMA was their vehicle's maiden voyage. The other MAST vehicle, Deceptions was red and white and used marine bilge pumps for propulsion. Bilge pumps are common propulsion systems aboard these vehicles. They are great because they are already waterproof. The students connect on/of switches to each pump and every time the pump turns on, it sucks water in one hose and shoots it out another hose, providing forward thrust. If these shots of power are coordinated, which they are via the control system, the vehicle proceeds as directed effortlessly on bilge pump power. Leading a group of hungry contestants from the MMA pool along the Cape Cod Canal, to the huge lunch mess deck was a treat. The training ship, Enterprise blocked the entire view of Buzzards Bay as we ate military style in the cafeteria. According to team mentor, and Diman Regional Technical Vocational High School teacher, Paul Beaudoin, this team worked on their vehicle in one of his after school robotics classes. The school regularly enters land based robotics events, but this is the first underwater competition they have tackled. Steve Rioux, a Dimon graduate, and now an electrical engineer at Lockheed Martin Corporation located just down the road in Marion, Massachusetts helped the team with some of their operational challenges. LMCO is extremely supportive of any program that trains workers for their facilities. Graduates of Diman and schools like it, are trained as electronics technicians, a skill set needed by the ocean technology community. The cost of materials to build the ROVs, as reported by the teams, ran from a low of $240 for the winning Blue Hills Technical High School team, to a high of $3,318 for the second place New York City Home Educators Association (NYCHEA) team. The cost/team was on average $1086. To put these costs into perspective, a commercially available ROV from Seabotix, Inc.can be purchased for around $16,000. The Teledyne Benthos ROV that was in the water video taping the competition sells for about $23,000. What is remarkable about the ROVs these students build is that they actually work. They are not robust enough to do any real work, but they certainly teach the students all the elements of design, building, project management and sportsmanship- attributes that will be extremely valuable in the work place. The results are always remarkable and somewhat unpredictable. The underdogs, from Blue Hills Technical High, located within miles of the toney private school, Milton Academy took the top spot with the highest score of
June 2008
28 MTR
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