The weekend of June 23, 2022 the Cabrillo College Robotics Club won first place in the MATE ROV Competition, a worldwide, underwater robotics competition held in Long Beach, California.
Represented by Ciaran Farley, Isaac Wax, and Spencer Koontz, the club was awarded the First Place Overall in the Pioneer Division, as well as the Engineering Presentation Champion award, and the Technical Documentation Champion award. Isaac Wax was the lead CAD/Mechanical engineer, electrical engineer, and did some minor software work in embedded C and python. Cabrillo alum Carter Frost assisted with the code.
This year was the 20th World Championship of the MATE ROV Competition that is known for challenging students to design and build underwater robots to tackle mission tasks based upon real world applications.
... we brought home an overall win, plus Engineering and Documentation wins! It made all of the lost sleep and time we took off of work well worth it!
— MATE ROV
For this year’s competition, MATE ROV accepted an invitation from the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development to “explore solutions to problems that impact all of us.” They created the 20th-year missions to address issues that can “deliver the ocean we need for the future we want!” The challenge was to create a robot needed to be able to remove a ghost net — a net that has been lost in the ocean — from an inter-array cable, maintain a healthy environment for fish, and farm seagrass.
The participating Cabrillo Robotics team members had heard about this competition from their time in high school, and pulled a team together to represent Cabrillo College.
“All three of us had done MATE in high school, in the Scout and Navigator classes that only go to regional competitions,” said Ciaran Farley, Cabrillo student and Robotics Club participant. “Now in college, we had the opportunity to participate in the Pioneer class at the world competition, and we brought home an overall win, plus Engineering and Documentation wins! It made all of the lost sleep and time we took off of work well worth it!”
“I am in awe of the hard work and the brilliance of the club members,” said Mike Matera, Faculty Advisor of the Cabrillo Robotics Club. “This win is even more impressive from a team that met mostly online last year. I can’t wait to see what they do next.”
In culmination of the awards, the champions won $700, four t200 thrusters, 4esc, magazine subscriptions, and ROV fellowship memberships.