A boat that drives itself and picks up trash from the ocean? That’s the stuff of science fiction, but it’s reality for a dozen lucky Upstate elementary, middle, and high school students.
The students are tasked with building their own autonomous boats in a Clemson University summer camp.
The campers are led by automotive engineering professors Srikanth Pilla and Yunyi Jia at the Clemson University International Center for Automotive Research (CU-ICAR). Sponsored by Bosch, the Autonomous Boat Summer Camp for Ocean Conservation guides students as they engineer their own small self-driving boats and learn the importance of cleaning the oceans.
Mike McCormick, vice president and technical plant manager at Bosch Rexroth in Fountain Inn, said, “Bosch has always supported programming that combines STEM education with environmental stewardship initiatives and this is a terrific example of that cross-section.”
“Plastic waste is the biggest threat to our oceans,” said Jia. “Animals end up eating these microtoxins and, in turn, die. Or sometimes we end up eating the animals and effectively poison ourselves.”
Jia said the camp is intended to keep students interested in STEM subjects – science, technology, engineering and math – but they also get a lot of ecological and sustainability knowledge.
“While teaching them all sorts of great information on autonomy, we’re using this as an opportunity to also show them that the ocean is worth saving,” he said.
During the camp students are learning about the harms of plastics, the basics of boat building, software coding and, of course, boat autonomy.
“It’s exciting to work with students of all different ages,” Pilla said. “These younger campers, their minds are wide open. Their creativity has no bounds. It’s truly remarkable. I can honestly say that sometimes they come up with stuff that I end up writing down because it’s that profound. I’d even say we end up learning just as much from them as they do from us.”
Thanks to additional funding from the Bosch Community Fund, the camp builds on a previous 2017 grant supporting an autonomous boat competition among Clemson students at CU-ICAR. In that competition, 71 students were divided into 18 groups that built autonomous boats with cruise control, boundary tracking and collision avoidance using the sensing signal processing, filtering techniques and advanced control methods they learned in class.
According to Jia, it was so well-received by the students that it prompted the professors to get involved for another go-round.
This summer’s camp will wrap up on July 9 when students will put their creations to the test by launching their boats in the pond on the CU-ICAR campus at 5 Research Drive in Greenville. The event is open to the public and starts around 1 p.m.
(Written by Bryce Donovan, Clemson University Relations.)