Outreach Blog

Outreach primarily focused on organizing for the Cambridge Science Festival, which occurred 12-4 p.m. on Sunday, October 1st. Reyna designed a small rubber band powered toy boat, 3D printed with PLA at 30% infill. Faith Victoria created a printable handout teaching people about PLA as a more sustainable plastic material. Wells assembled a list of assembly instructions to set out at the CSF table.

About 60 toy boats with propellers were 3D printed and hand-filed in preparation for the event. Both Ultimaker printers in the Sea Grant teaching lab, a few printers in the IDC, and Wells’ personal 3D printer were used for production. Time was the main constraint in this operation because a print of 4-5 boats took a full day when printed in the IDC or Sea Grant.

At CSF, the toy boats were a big success! We ran out of boats after about 1.5 hours. If this were repeated in the future, the hole fitting the rubber band should be widened for easier assembly, given the target audience. Ultimately, a redesign of the toy boat concept is preferable both in terms of manufacturing ease and sustainability. It would have been better to repurpose materials (for example, juice box boats) – next time!

Other team members joined us at CSF and were a great help in teaching visitors about Minerva and Arcturus. Since we were located right next to SeaPerch, some of our volunteers helped children navigate the SeaPerch robot activity.

Our next focus will be developing a lesson plan for Splash 2023.

Last week, several Arcturus members had the opportunity to run the Discover Ocean Engineering program for incoming freshmen. It was a wonderful week filled with fun, robots, and plenty of food!

Over the week, students built their own underwater remotely operated vehicles called Sea Perches. From soldering control boards to potting motors in silicone to building PVC chassis, students were able to see their entire robot come together from scratch. For many, this was their first time learning to solder and cut PVC, so we had plenty of tutorials. For their final challenge, they competed head-to-head in the Sea Perch Olympics, where they were challenged with popping each other’s balloons and pushing over floaties and sinkers into the opposite “end zone” before time was up! At the end of each round, the points were tallied and we’d move the winners up the bracket. We saw some really cool designs come out of this, since each ROV needed to balance being maneuverable while also maximizing their opportunity to collect the floaties and sinkers. They really made use of all the parts we had in lab, adding netting and push pins! At the end of the week, the students got to take home their sea perches!

Over the course of the week, we had several talks from industry experts and MIT faculty. In particular, Michael S Triantafyllou (the head of the OE department) spoke about the importance of ocean engineering as a field of study to protect the environment, highlighting interesting examples of bio-inspired or naval engineering. Peter Godart (CEO of Found Energy) talked about his work on aluminum fuel developing an economical way to recycle materials while providing clean energy and fresh water. And finally, Keith Ellenbogen showed us his photos/videos of underwater creatures, including fish, jellyfish, and sharks!

On Wednesday, we got a tour of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Cape Cod. There we saw a bunch of autonomous underwater vehicles, which taught students how important buoyancy, communications, and pressure are in shaping the vehicle design. We then walked down to the docks, where we saw the Mayflower 400, an autonomous boat by ProMare which collects data which informs us of critical issues such as climate change, ocean plastic pollution and marine mammal conservation.

Afterwards, we drove to Natick where we had a night of games at Level99, which is a mix of an escape room and arcade. It was a fun mix of physical and mental challenges, with rooms requiring some combination of teamwork, verbal communication, strategy, dexterity, or strength!

To finish off the program, we went to View Boston on the Prudential center tower, which was beautiful and had a really neat projection of the Boston skyline!

A bunch of Arcturus members had the opportunity to travel to Faial Island in Portugal for a marine robotics summer school program this summer.

There we got to meet grad students and PhD students from Portuguese universities who study different disciplines related to the ocean. I thought it was a really cool experience to see engineers, biologists, and oceanographers all sharing their knowledge and collaborating on projects.

We were split into small groups and tasked with building a marine drifter out of biodegradable materials. The idea was that we would release the drifters and then over the next few days, we would predict where the drifters would go based on our knowledge of the currents in the area.

This was actually a really interesting design problem, since the GPS needs to be sticking out of the water to transmit its location, so the entire assembly needs to be self-righting in case the waves tip it over. We spent a few days building and testing in the bay, and then when we finally deployed the drifters, we were visited by dolphins!

Over the course of the summer school, we had the opportunity to listen to lectures about oceanography, current simulation, animal tagging, and ocean archaeology from experts around the world. We also got to launch AUVs, or autonomous underwater vehicles, to map the bay, and fly drones for fun!

And at some point, we did an ocean safety training in the bay where they taught us all about what it takes to survive and get rescued if you’re lost at sea. The water was super cold, but it really goes to show how important these survival techniques are in keeping warm and finding help.

Other highlights of the program were when we dissected fish and visited a conservation and aquaculture center, which had these cute little turtles! Over the weekend, we got to visit Pico, a neighboring island, where we went cliff diving.

The program was also a great opportunity to explore azores and see the natural beauty we all are working so hard to protect. I mean, just look at this view I saw on a hike at sunset. We also visited the island's caldera, which was formed when a volcano erupted and then collapsed.

Overall, I think the program was a really memorable and fun way to learn a ton about marine robotics and science! If you’re an MIT student or student at a Portuguese university, we’d definitely recommend you apply next year since the travel expenses were all covered!

Several Arcturus members had the opportunity to present their research at the OCEANS 2023 conference in Limerick, Ireland earlier this month!

In particular, the following students attended:

• Jessica Lam - Characterizing the T200 thrusters from Blue Robotics
• Audrey Chen - Construction and electronics for low-cost autonomous surface vehicle platforms
• Erin Menezes - Testing lateral line sensors for biomimicry
• Ansel Garcia-Langley - Integrating autonomy solutions into K12 curriculum for remotely operated vehicles

This conference was a wonderful opportunity to meet others working in marine sciences and engineering from around the world. With numerous lectures from experts in the field, we learned a lot about major movements and challenges in the industry. And of course, we loved exploring Ireland, a country none of us had been to prior!

We would like to thank the MIT Sea Grant and Andrew Bennett for their support of our students and their research! We would never have been able to attend without you!

The MIT department of mechanical engineering invited us to demonstrate Ship Happens to the MIT mechanical engineering community alongside many very interesting research projects. Jared, Amy, and Toya talked to many members of the MIT community, telling them about our team structure, the boat, our experiences at Roboboat last month, and our excitement for the upcoming Njord challenge. We even ran into some of our beloved mechanical engineering professors, including John Leonard and Mathias Kolle. We had an incredible time showing off our work to the MIT mechanical engineering community.

Campus Preview Weekend is a weekend where admitted prefrosh visit MIT and learn more about the school. For CPW, we wanted to introduce the prefrosh to Arcturus since we’re one of the newest teams through a few events.

First, we visited the ASA Midway and showed off our boat, including our vision demo! We also ran an interest form in hopes that students that commit might join the team next year! We were also sure to pub our next event, Underwater Battlebots!

Right after the midway, we held our battlebots event! The MIT Sea Grant is a bit far from main campus, so we were a bit worried about people getting lost or losing internet, but Amy did an amazing job chalking the floor with arrows towards the event, which really helped the students find us (as well as some other curious passersby)! We had students build underwater ROVs (remotely operated vehicles) called Sea Perches using PVC. But as an extra spin on it, we had them challenge one another by pushing rubber ducks or sinkers at the bottom of the tank into the opposing team’s “end zone” for 3 points each or popping balloons on their opponent’s for 5 points each. The winner was whoever got the highest score by the end of the two minute round! Building off of what we did for Spark, we allotted a whole 3 hours this time instead of 2, which really enabled the students to get more time testing with some spare time to run a formalized tournament. It was awesome to see so many students interested in marine robots, and with around 40 attendees, our mentor said he’d never seen the test tank room so full before. So many of the students said it was their favorite event, which was wonderful to hear! We were really impressed by their clever designs, many of which implemented push pins to pop balloons in interesting ways. We really hope that they commit to MIT and join us next year!

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Today we attended the Edgerton Center showcase! The Edgerton Center is a department at MIT dedicated to supporting student build groups. After bringing our boat in (and discovering, miraculously, that it fit in our mentor’s car) we set up our vision demo and had our water gun automatically aim at our target. We also shot off a few balls on our ball launcher! There were many community members and kids who took interest in our work, which was very exciting! We also got to show off our work to many sponsors, mentors, and professors who we work with!

During the MC portion of the showcase, our captain Audrey and Chloe from MIT motorsports interviewed each of the teams. It was awesome to meet two of the newest teams for the first time, First Nations Launch (which makes rockets using Indigenous design) and the Electric Vehicle Team (which is currently making hydrogen powered motorcycles)!

Spark is a weekend-long event at MIT where 7th and 8th graders come to MIT’s campus to take classes taught by MIT students! On Saturday, we had around 30 middle school students from around the country work in groups to build their own Sea Perches, remotely operated underwater vehicles, in the MIT Sea Grant. We began with a brief lecture on pressure, buoyancy, and Archimedes' principle, so they would understand the physics of how underwater vehicles work.

From there, we broke students off into groups of 3 to 4 and gave them a live demo of how to build and drive a Sea Perch, including cutting PVC, patching or drilling holes, and attaching the motors. After showing them some examples, the students began creating their own ROVs. We think the kids had a really good time, and we really enjoyed seeing all the creative designs they came up with, since they were different shapes and sizes we’ve never tried before!

Despite some travel mishaps (aka accidentally going to the Harvard main campus instead of the new engineering building on the other side of the Charles), I am glad that I took time out of my weekend to attend the conference and learn more about women in tech industries. The different presenters were all impressive and shared many important lessons about their experiences.

Of course, most of my time was spent attending speaker events. I enjoyed Nietfield’s humorous and down-to-earth talk breaking down the myth that choosing tech means ignoring creative passions. I had never considered how tech builds skills that can prove invaluable in creative pursuits as well, such as patience, accepting failure, and asking for help. Thanawala’s keynote on why women fail to be promoted in the workplace was brutally honest and useful in guiding my thoughts on what I should work on next. Her advice was based on research as well as her own experience as a woman who had worked in the tech industry for years, and her examples illustrated her points vividly. The talk was so engaging that most of the crowd stayed when she went half an hour over the scheduled time to finish the presentation.

I overall enjoyed the experience, met numerous impressive women working in different sectors of the tech industry, and would recommend it to anyone interested in it next year.

On Tuesday, five of us from Arcturus attended the Blue Innovation Symposium in Rhode Island, an annual event centered around marine technology and the blue space. This event brought together marine technology experts, investors, and companies, which was a valuable opportunity for us to learn about the most advanced technologies in the blue space field and the future steps of development.

A highlight was that we got to meet Dr. Jim Bellingham, the executive director of the Institute of Assured Autonomy at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Bellingham founded the MIT Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) Lab in 1988 which is part of the MIT Sea Grant. After Dr. Bellingham was very happy to share with us his previous experience working at MIT Sea Grant and founding the AUV Lab.

After the speaker panel, we also met many startups with innovative marine technologies covering different aspects of the blue space. Among the companies we met, Juice Robotics mainly focuses on AUV; Net-Zero Edge provides subsea data; Shift Environmental Technology runs various projects on coastal technology and coastal resource management, such as the Coastal Incident Management System that aims to reduce incidents’ impacts; and Sensor Technology produces acoustic sensors.

Seeing how these startups create different technologies to contribute to the blue space also emphasized an important theme of the event — to maintain and even improve the health of the ocean ecosystem. One of the projects that really spoke to this theme was Net-Zero Edge’s data center, which uses subsea data centers that can reduce not only energy costs but also CO2 emissions. It is also our goal to learn from these pioneers in the field and develop autonomous on-surface and underwater vehicles that are environmentally responsible.

Overall, we thought the Blue Innovations Symposium was a wonderful opportunity to meet those interested in the Ocean Engineering space and learn more about where our technology might be applied in industry.

The Aluminum Cobblers, a FIRST Tech Challenge team from Natick High School, reached out to us after meeting us at the Cambridge Science Festival. We offered them a tour of MIT Sea Grant, giving them the opportunity to see some of the awesome research projects we’re working on including Flippy (the autonomous oyster bag flipper), Zippy (the zipline-mounted coastal monitoring robot), the underwater high speed camera rig (capturing footage of fish at 20,000 frames per second), and the SeaPerch II program (which teaches K-12 and first year college students how to build and program remotely operated underwater vehicles). We also got to give them some tips on how to effectively run a team of different levels, overcome obstacles, and work with the 3 other robotics teams they share a space with. We also closed out with a design review of their modules on their robot. So many of us had also done FTC or FRC robotics in high school, so this was an awesome blast from the past for us. We really enjoyed sharing what we’ve learned about building robots (and robotics teams!) with them!

Arcturus participated in the Cambridge Science Festival located in Kendall Square, right on the edge of MIT’s campus. We were part of the Robot Zoo section of the festival, which was a fantastic opportunity to show off our autonomous surface vehicle to the Cambridge community and introduce them to MIT newest project team. We had a fun time explaining what “autonomy” means to many families who visited, and the kids were especially fascinated by our ball launch system and LiDAR mount. It was amazing to also meet local researchers who had great ideas to share with us, and also a high school robotics team who told us all about the robots that they were building.

Overall, it was a very fun and educational day, and we look forward to participating in the future! Thank you CSF!

Arcturus recently did a demo at the MIT Sailing Pavilion of our two vessels, Athena and Ship Happens. This was as a part of a broader kickoff weekend for the MIT Corporation, the governing body of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and board of trustees. Joining our vessels were several research platforms from the MIT Marine Autonomy Lab, which was working on a robot coordination project between several identical surface vehicles. It was great to get to know more of the faces behind the institute and meet many of the others working in marine engineering!