Desert WAVE

Desert WAVE (Women in Autonomous Vehicle Engineering), is a robotics team formed in partnership with the Si Se Puede Foundation and Arizona State University. It is comprised of over two dozen women studying various engineering fields at ASU! This team was formed to encourage collaboration across all branches of engineering as well as to expose team members to the challenges they may face in the workforce.

Desert WAVE recently competed in the 2019 International RoboSub Competition where they were tasked with designing and fabricating an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle capable of autonomously navigating through a series of increasingly difficult challenges. Facing off against 55 teams from over 12 countries, the team placed 3rd, making them the highest ranking team in the United States.

Desert WAVE’s goal is to continue upgrading their autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) into an even more versatile competitor by developing higher level systems for advanced underwater manipulation, computer vision, and inter-vehicle communication. The team also intends to fabricate a brand new, secondary AUV to work alongside their current one. Historically, the most successful teams at RoboSub typically utilize two AUVs employing inter-vehicle communication to complete the more challenging of the competition tasks.

Desert WAVE has already collected $35,000 from in-kind donations to help them build their first AUV. Of these, the most critical components include a doppler velocity logger (DVL) to measure velocity, fiber-optic gyro (FOG) to maintain heading and positioning, and an underwater acoustic positioning system for inter-vehicle communication.

With your help, we can pay for our future engineers to attend this competition, and upgrade our AUV, so that we can continue challenging established teams and become first in the world!

The 2020 Robosub competition will be held in San Diego, CA at the NIWC Pacific TRANSDEC from August 3rd - 9th. For more information about this competition, please visit their website. https://robonation.org/programs/robosub/

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