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What is Arcturus?

Arcturus is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's autonomous robotics team! Founded just last year, Arcturus has grown rapidly, tripling in size. This season, we are building two autonomous boats and an underwater vehicle! We're excited to make a splash in the RoboBoat competition and the Njord Challenge. Check out our blog series to see what we're up to!

What is RoboBoat?

RoboBoat is an annual international competition where undergraduate students design and build a small Autonomous Surface Vehicle (ASV) to complete a variety of tasks that mimic real-world challenges facing the maritime industry. The competition also tasks us with raising team funds, documenting our progress, and organizing outreach. In this way, we hope to take what we learn and give back to our community. The competition will be held in Sarasota, Florida from March 15th to 21st, 2023. If you’d like to learn more about the Roboboat competition, please visit RoboBoat.

What is The Njord Challenge?

The Njord Challenge is a student-driven competition held in Trondheim. Njord’s mission is to inspire students to become world leading engineers in maritime autonomous solutions by designing and programming autonomous ships. The competition will be held in Trondheim, Norway from August 14th - 18th, 2023. If you’d like to learn more about the Njord Challenge, please visit Njord Challenge.

What We Do

Learning about dynamics and controls in class is one thing, but working together and actually seeing your ideas come to life is something else. Arcturus provides an incredible opportunity for students to learn the fundamentals of applied engineering, including computer aided design, finite element analysis, laser cutting, drilling, milling, rapid prototyping, and programming. It is very important to us that students understand how their work relates to the entire system, and that each subteam learns to clearly communicate their technical progress, since those are key skills for engineers. These kinds of skills would be very difficult to learn or teach in a classroom environment, so we believe this will be an incredibly enriching and rewarding experience for our members.

Our Mission

Our mission is to:

  • Give undergraduates hands-on experience leading teams and applying their knowledge by building and programming autonomous vehicles
  • Share our love of robots with the community through a series of outreach events including lab tours, demos, classes, and mentorship.
  • Create technology that we believe will positively impact the environment and coastal communities.