ROV Competition

Recently, I had the pleasure of being able to assist at the International MATE ROV competition, held at the King County Aquatic Center in Federal Way, WA this year.  My function was a diver -- I helped set up the underwater "courses" for the student teams to run their robots through, and then spent one day at the competitions assisting.


During competitions, divers have the following functions:

• reset the course after a team has completed their run
• act as the judges' eyes if there is a question about the state of the course ("did the team properly insert the widget into the slot?")
• untangle the team's ROV if it gets stuck on something (but only after receiving permission from the judges, as this results in a penalty to the team).

While the teams were preparing and running their ROVs, there wasn't a whole lot for us divers to do, so I spent a lot of the time taking pictures and video.  Finally tonight I have posted these online, mostly un-curated (I removed the out-of-focus pictures but otherwise didn't do much to post-process them):

• Photos at Picasa/Google+
• Photos at Flickr (slightly higher quality)
• Video playlist at YouTube