Robotics club members at St. Mary Catholic Community School in Crown Point are currently developing underwater robots and learning how they help to keep our seaports safe at MATE Regional ROV Competition to be held at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago.
For the second year in a row, a team from St. Mary’s Underwater Robotics Club will compete in the Marine Advanced Technology Education (MATE) Regional Student ROV Competition to be held in April. Remotely operated vehicles, or ROVs, are tethered underwater robots used to complete tasks in underwater environments. The team will compete against more than 20 teams from the Chicagoland area using an ROV that they are designing and building this school year.
Each year, MATE’s ROV competition encourages students to learn and apply science, technology, engineering, and math skills to complete tasks that simulate real-world problems from the ocean workplace. To learn entrepreneurial skills, student teams must form “companies” that produce ROV products to complete a specific set of tasks.
The year, the contest focuses on how ROVs are used to ensure the health and safety of our seaports--from monitoring cargo containers to cleaning up contaminants on the seafloor. Teams will participate in ROV product demonstrations that require them to pilot their vehicle to complete tasks such as constructing an underwater “hyperloop” system, sampling sediments for contaminants, investigating containers that fell from a cargo ship to the seafloor, and repairing a fountain used in a water and light show. In addition, teams must prepare technical documentation for their vehicle, make a product, make a product presentation to a panel of judges and create a marketing display.