National Underwater Robot Competition

[N7UJJ]

This weekend, the Falcon Robotics, tem 842 will not only be competing in the Honeywell Hometown Solutions National Underwater ROV Competition (NURC), but the kids, along with Arizona State University and Chandler High School (team 1290), are hosting the competition. (www.H2ORobots.org). There are other FIRST teams competing.

We are promoting the values of FIRST: Gracious Professionalism, cooperation, excitement, etc. We are also promoting Math, Science and Technology as exciting fields and we want young people to see how exciting engineering can be.

We have written press releases and our local radio, TV and newspapers will be covering the event. We will also be doing something that we are very excited about: the event will be webcast! We estimate that there will be thousands of viewers all over the world watching the teams competing. June 9, 8pm PDT - 2 am PDT (11pm EDT - 5am EDT). http://129.219.18.35/islive2 Archive will be alive a few days later at http://dmit.asu.edu/live/

Some unusual tidbits:
University and High School teams compete with each other.
Live webcast.
This will be one competition that the Falcon ROV team will not be awarded a trophy. Since we are co-hosts, we have disqualified our team from awards, although they will compete for the fun of it.
The event takes place at night in an outdoor pool. The ROVs will have to have their own lighting, simulating the darkness in the deep ocean.
Underwater video camera are positioned throughout the pool area so spectators can watch the action.
Don Knight, a FIRST announcer will be providing commentary.
All the teams have produced videos that will be shown during the “slow times”.
Emphasizing the cooperative and mentoring values of FIRST, teams receive points for their intra team interactions. The teams technical documents have already been published: http://www.h2orobots.org/teamtechreports.htm

I hope you’ll “tune in” and consider competing at the next NURC!

Thanks,

Allan