GILROY
– While some Gilroy High School students were relaxing during
their last few days of spring break, eight others were trying their
hands at deep-sea exploration using underwater robots.
GILROY – While some Gilroy High School students were relaxing during their last few days of spring break, eight others were trying their hands at deep-sea exploration using underwater robots.
Two teams of GHS students competed in the fourth annual Underwater Robotics Contest held at Monterey Peninsula College last Saturday. Their goal was to complete three tasks, such as placing a Velcro patch on a barre, and using a Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) they engineered themselves. The students are all members of GHS’ MESA (Math Engineering Science Achievement) club.
One team of three students competed in the general competition. Nathen Aleman, Nick Gariaeff and Nathan Davidson took third place in the patching task.
Five students competed in the more rigorous “Ranger” class, for returning competitors, building a larger and more complex robot, or “bot.”
“We had a little trouble completing the task,” said Jonathan Moore, a senior on the Ranger team, who plans to study marine biology next year. “Some of our difficulties were with picking things up and grabbing on to things.”
Although the Ranger team, which also included Nate Barmore, Steve Bennett, Megan Hungerford and Nynette Sicisnaros, did not finish, it was a “successful failure,” said Matt Hungerford, MESA advisor and math teacher at GHS.
“They learned a lot and there’s a lot of fun involved in it, too,” he said. “The idea is to get them interested in engineering, but also in the technology – in ROVs – and realize that the ocean is one of the last places on earth to explore and this is the way to get things done because you can’t put a person down there, but you can put an ROV down there.”
The students began working on their vehicles in January and estimated they invested about 1,000 hours on the project.
“We were spending a lot more time on it this year,” said Barmore, Ranger team captain and MESA president. “It went much better than I expected it to be. We were down to the wire with time and we were worried. The day of the competition, it was actually working much better than it was in practice.”
Each of the Ranger-level tasks was completed while the team was unable to see the bottom of the pool: The students attached cameras to the robot and directed it while watching video images on a TV screen.
Part of the difficulty Saturday, Hungerford said, was glare from the sun. When the students reviewed their tape Monday morning, the images were “clear as a bell,” making it easy to critique their performance, he said.
“If we had had more practice, we would have done a lot better, but definitely we had competitive ability,” said Barmore, who also plans to study marine biology next year at UC Santa Cruz.
The students did some fund-raising through MESA and received various donations to build the robots.
