{"id":62147,"date":"2011-06-27T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-06-27T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news-draft\/uncategorized\/uri-engineering-students-win-international-roboboat-competition\/"},"modified":"2011-06-27T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2011-06-27T00:00:00","slug":"uri-engineering-students-win-international-roboboat-competition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/2011\/06\/uri-engineering-students-win-international-roboboat-competition\/","title":{"rendered":"URI engineering students win International RoboBoat Competition"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\t\tStudents designed, raced robotic boats through aquatic obstacle course<\/p>\n


\n\tKINGSTON, R.I. \u2013 June 27, 2011 — A team of engineering students at the University of Rhode Island has captured the 2011 International RoboBoat Competition, a contest to design a robotic boat that can race through an aquatic obstacle course without any human controls.<\/p>\n


\n\tSponsored by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International and held in Virginia Beach, Va., the URI students defeated 14 teams from as far away as Taiwan and Indonesia. The University of Central Florida, Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech and Stevens Institute rounded out the top five. <\/p>\n


\n\tAccording to Ocean Engineering Professor Robert Tyce, who served as the team\u2019s coach, the competition required the student-designed boats to autonomously navigate a series of buoys, turn off a waterfall, identify which of several targets was \u201con fire\u201d, put out the fire with a water cannon, and pick up a tennis ball off a dock before returning home. The URI boat design included a computer camera, scanning laser range finder, infrared thermal sensor, precision GPS, water cannon, extendable arm with ball grabber, twin trolling motor propulsion system, custom power systems, along with several embedded microcontroller and PC computers programmed by the students.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cOther teams navigated the buoy channel better than us, but none of them even attempted any of the other tasks,\u201d said Hayden Radke, an ocean engineering major from Saunderstown. \u201cWe preferred to try and fail rather than not try at all. This concept didn\u2019t seem to occur to the other teams.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n\tAdded graduate student Andrew Bird of Lichfield, England: \u201cOther teams went for the safest option, whereas we went for the more difficult path, and it paid off.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n\tURI has entered the competition each of the last three years and placed in the top five every time. A URI team also enters a similar contest to design a robotic submarine, which it won in its first try in 2000. This year\u2019s submarine competition, which will involve the same 20 URI students as won the Roboboat contest, takes place in July.<\/p>\n


\n\t\u201cThis experience has led to a number of job offers for team members, interest from instrument manufacturers to install their products on our boat, and the funding to go to the autonomous underwater vehicle competition in San Diego later this year,\u201d said graduate student Edward Richards of Providence. \u201cIt has also led to a number of new contacts within the robotics community and tighter relations among team members.\u201d<\/p>\n


\n\tSponsors of the URI team were Raytheon, Battelle, Trimble\/Pacific Crest, Dane Tech, The Mathworks, Ocean Server, the URI Ocean Engineering Department, the URI Center of Excellence in Underwater Technology, and the URI College of Engineering, <\/p>\n


\nPictured above

\n URI engineering students begin a test run of the robotic boat that won the international competition.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Students designed, raced robotic boats through aquatic obstacle course KINGSTON, R.I. \u2013 June 27, 2011 — A team of engineering students at the University of Rhode Island has captured the 2011 International RoboBoat Competition, a contest to design a robotic boat that can race through an aquatic obstacle course without any human controls. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":62149,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-62147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archives"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62147"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62147\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/62149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}