APASE History
Submarine in the Desert!
By Faridodin “Fredi” Lajvardi
It was in June, 2006 at the Johnson Space Center’s Neutral Buoyancy Lab in Houston, Texas where the idea was born. Carl Hayden High School, Chandler High School, Arizona State University’s WISE (Women in Science & Engineering) director, and the director of the community outreach organization Si Se Puede formed a pact that they would hold an underwater robotics competition in Arizona in one year’s time. The partnership was forged during the Marine Advanced Technologies Education Center’s National Remotely Operated Vehicle Championships.
There were several reasons to form this unique ad hoc organization, primarily the group’s desire to promote more engineering and scientific competitions in Arizona for Arizonans. Many major national technological events were happening all over the country. FIRST Robotics has its massive international robotics competition in Atlanta, Georgia, DARPA has its Grand Challenge in Nevada, the Office of Naval Research has its autonomous underwater robotics competition in San Diego, and so on. There was nothing in Arizona! The culture of the population makes it difficult for such engineering and technological events to take hold. Each year the title sponsor for the Arizona FIRST regional robotics tournament, Microchip, with its CEO Steve Sanghi, has to scrape together a group of local businesses and corporations to put on a regional event. Arizona is not known as one of the focal points in the United States for science and technological competitions on any level. Arizona ranks low or next to last in many studies or surveys that rank education throughout the United States. Something had to change. Another reason to develop an Arizona competition was that the MATE ROV event that has been in Santa Barbara and now Houston was going to St. Johns, Canada.
Carl Hayden High School’s Falcon Robotics team achieved national attention when they won the MATE National ROV Championships in 2004, beating out all the other universities and colleges in the competition, giving MIT second place. Proving that it wasn’t a fluke, the Falcon Robotics ROV team placed 3rd in the university category in 2005 and 2nd in 2006! The Carl Hayden team had established themselves as one of the preeminent ROV teams in the country. They have been in Wired magazine, and Reader’s Digest, and featured on ABC’s Nightline. One would think that the team would want to continue their run in the MATE competition. However, they faced a great barrier that even the “can do” Falcons could not cross, and that was the international border between Canada and the United States. According to reports, 60-80 percent of the students that attend Carl Hayden High School are undocumented. The team decided that it could not and would not put any of the students at risk in order to compete in the MATE competition in Canada. Furthermore, team members that were legal residents or citizens felt that it would not be right to leave fellow team members home because of their immigration status. So the only underwater competition the Falcon Robotics team could be in was one that they would create themselves. This realization gave the “can do” attitude of the Falcons a new focus toward which they would direct their energies while helping to advance Arizona onto the science and technology competitions map.
In the FIRST robotics community of Arizona the Carl Hayden Falcons are known as a role model team. They competed for the coveted Chairman’s Award, FIRST’s highest award, and won it an unprecedented three times at the Arizona Regional. No other Arizona team has ever won the Chairman’s Award in any regional event throughout the United States.
“The Chairman’s Award represents the spirit of FIRST. It honors the
team that, in the judges’ estimation, best represents a model for other
teams to emulate, and which embodies the goals and purpose of
FIRST. It remains FIRST’s most prestigious award.”
All the regional Chairman’s winners go to the FIRST International Championships where they compete against each other. The Falcon Robotics team has been in the hunt now for three years, vying for the National Chairman’s Award, and they have been in serious contention.
The success of the Carl Hayden team in Arizona and across the country earned them enough respect that organizations throughout the state were not afraid to jump in and commit to helping Carl Hayden and the ad hoc group, self titled Arizona Promoters of Applied Science in Education, or APASE. APASE was created to promote science and technological competitions in Arizona. The group wanted not only for Arizonans to have more access to competitive events, but to have groups from outside the state come to compete, thus drawing more energy and focus to Arizona. APASE is consistent with the FIRST robotics goal of “helping to change the culture” by drawing the attention of today’s youth to the scientific and technological heroes of today.
The APASE group drew more support during the planning period of the event, now dubbed the National Underwater Robotics Challenge, or NURC. Arizona State University’s Applied Learning Technologies Institute, alt-I, volunteered to process the video from the pool, not only to present the video to a live audience in a large presentation room, but also to send it out live over the local cable television and the Internet for the World Wide Web to see. The video would also be archived for future teams to watch and learn from. In addition to the live video feeds from the ROVs themselves, eight cameras were stationed throughout the pool to capture the ROV action.
The $250 entry fees along with donations from local businesses were sufficient to finance what would be a low budget event. It was at this point that
Honeywell Hometown Solutions contacted APASE and offered to help sponsor the competition. They raised the event to a whole new level. Their donation of $15,000.00 allowed NURC to provide food, trophies, t-shirts, and an awards banquet, making NURC a high caliber event. Honeywell also brought in additional qualified judges to join the judges from industry, research institutions, and the U.S. Navy.
By this time ten teams, both high schools and universities, were signed up and developing their underwater robots. As the date of the event drew closer one team dropped out to compete in the MATE event in Canada. They felt that they could not make the shipping timelines to do both so they chose the one in the “great white north.” They were the only team from outside the state.
The NURC mission scenario, which is based on a true story, revolved around the adventures of a group of extreme divers who discovered a World War II German submarine that had sunk 60 miles off the coast of New Jersey. The competition parameters were modified to accommodate the use of ROVs. Basically, there was a 30 foot long, 8 foot diameter mock-up of the sunken German submarine U-869. It had three openings. One was the conning tower hatch, another was a blast hole in the left rear of the submarine, and the other was in the front left side of the submarine. There were two “live” torpedoes that were near the front opening on the floor next to the submarine. There was a gaseous volcanic vent that was emitting through the floor of the submarine.
The mission goals were as follows: 1) identify the name and designation of the submarine by locating, reading and retrieving the submarine’s identification tag; 2) locate and retrieve up to four human artifacts that would identify crew members; 3) measure the temperature of the gaseous volcanic vent; 4) measure the depth of the rear blast opening of the submarine; 5) locate and decipher a sonic location pinger broadcasting a Morse code message; 6) retrieve the two “live” torpedoes without detonating them.
To create a more realistic scenario, the mission was to take place at a simulated 1000 feet. They could not simulate the pressure of that depth, but they did simulate the lighting conditions. The missions were run at night starting at 8pm and continuing until 2am. This meant that teams had to provide their own on-board lighting in order to complete the mission. Each team had 30 minutes to do the mission with bonus points for finishing early.
An additional APASE goal is to develop vertical articulation. The idea is to get grade schools, home schools, high schools, charter schools, colleges, universities and corporations to compete in the same event. It is the vertical articulation among all these groups, the students and the “real world”, that is the primary emphasis. Today’s culture emphasizes the separation of these groups. They simply don’t mix anymore. APASE intends to mix them. These various groups need the opportunity to observe and learn from each other. It is the networking that is the key here. As far as scoring goes, all teams attempt the same mission tasks under the same criteria, but trophies are awarded in each category – high school, colleges and universities, etc. There is also an overall winner determined from among all participating teams regardless of category.
As far as Carl Hayden High School was concerned, whether or not to compete was a dilemma as they were the host of the event. No matter how you play it or try to make it fair, they anticipated that they might be perceived as having an unfair advantage. Therefore, while they did compete, their score did not count toward the awards.
Carl Hayden High School and Inventivity, LLC. joined forces to create an ROV-in-a-BOX to help novice teams take the “plunge” into the underwater robotics world. Hopefully, this will enable grade school students to enter the competition, and will jumpstart existing land robotics teams to “dive” into the competition as well. In fact, the team that won the overall competition this inaugural year, Buena High School from Sierra Vista, used the ROV-in-a-BOX as the foundation of their robot.
One year prior, a group of educators and activists joined together to address a problem they agreed existed in Arizona. One year later, they pulled off a scientifically and technologically challenging event that combined high schools with colleges and universities in an underwater robotics competition. With an audience in attendance, live video from both the ROV cameras and the pool’s underwater cameras was broadcast to a viewing room, accompanied by a play-by-play commentary that explained what was going on. All of this was also going out to the public via cable television and live webcast! The competition was a great success and plans are being made for the next NURC event to be held next June of 2008.