High Flyers

Three Kids and a Robot Learn to Save the Day

A military transport airplane has just gone down in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Senegal. It was carrying a world-renowned scientist, four vials of an anti-Ebola virus serum, and a hand-held computer with notes for fighting an Ebola disease outbreak in central Africa.

Your mission: send a remote-controlled rescue robot into the sunken plane’s fuselage and bring back the serum and the hand-held computer.

This crisis is fiction, but it could easily be fact. It was the simulated scenario faced by three first-year students from Embry-Riddle, who won first place in the university division at the National Underwater Robotics Challenge, held June 6-8 in Chandler, Ariz.

Eduardo Moreno, Cory Ravetto, and Rene Valenzuela, who are aerospace engineering majors at the university’s Prescott, Ariz., campus, designed and built their winning vehicle, “Medusa,” in only three months.

The robot’s domed shape – medusa is Spanish for “jellyfish” – stood out among other contestants’ box-shaped entries and also won the judges award for most unique design at the three-day competition.

“We just combined our knowledge,” said Ravetto, who met his teammates last year in freshman engineering classes.

Aside from a few electronic parts, the Embry-Riddle students manufactured all the hardware for their robot.

“Because there were only three of us, we had to do everything. It taught me a lot about engineering,” said Valenzuela, who worked on the robot’s sensors and video camera and “drove” the vehicle.

Student teams were judged on their technical report, oral presentation, and simulated rescue mission. During the rescue, teams had to make their remote-controlled underwater robots locate a submerged aircraft at night in a pool, navigate inside the fuselage, and perform a variety of tasks.

In addition to retrieving the four vials of serum and the hand-held computer, the robots had to measure the temperature where the serum was found to ensure its viability, measure the depth of the sunken plane, and retrieve the “black box” flight recorder from the cockpit.

All tasks were performed at night to replicate the low light levels of the ocean floor and used remote control and onboard camera feeds.

The Embry-Riddle students’ advisor was John Nafziger, assistant professor of mechanical engineering.

Student Teams Take First in FAA Airport Design Contest

Two student teams from Embry-Riddle took first-place awards in the FAA’s Design Competition for Universities in June for their proposals on the use of alternative fuels and GPS technology at airports.

The Airport Management Club at the Daytona Beach campus, led by business students Joost Vlek, Richard Genge, and Andrew Wilhelm, was the top team in the category of Runway Safety/Runway Incursions. Their proposal recommended using GPS technologies in a new way to decrease runway incursions caused by ground vehicles operating around runways.

A team of business administration students from the Worldwide campus’s Sky Harbor Center in Phoenix, Ariz., also won in the category of Airport Environmental Interactions for their proposal to use solar energy as a clean, cost-effective alternative fuel for airport ground support equipment. The winning students were Cynthia Cooke, Zeino Daryani, Roxann Favors, Tamie Fisher, Samuel Niko, Robyn Sullivan, and Sandra Torres. A second Sky Harbor team captured an honorable mention in the Runway Safety/Runway Incursions category.

Both first-place teams presented their winning proposals at the American Association of Airport Executives annual meeting in June.

The competition requires students to seek the advice of airport operators and industry experts in developing and assessing their proposals.

This year, 36 proposals were entered from 16 colleges and universities. The winners were selected by panels of FAA, industry, and academic experts.