Diving Deep: St. Patrick’s Robotics Team Requests Your Help for Ocean Exploration!

We are the Middle School Robotics Team, the Wolfhounds, representing St. Patrick’s Episcopal Day School as part of the First Lego League (FLL). This year’s Lego Robotics club consists of six Grade Six students and our robotics coach, Dr. Cole. We meet every Tuesday morning and afternoon as well as most Saturdays in preparation for the FLL competition on Saturday, November, 23. When we meet we program our Lego robot to solve missions using Spike Prime. Missions are tasks on a gameboard made with Lego that represent real-world marine situations, as this year’s theme is called Submerged.

As a part of the FLL competition, we need to propose an innovation (a new idea or an improvement on another idea) related to ocean exploration to the judges. At the competition, they will judge us on how well we complete the missions, present our innovation project, and work as a team. 

For our innovation, we are interested in the use of underwater drones for research. We discovered that one limitation of current examples is battery life. We are interested in proposing a system of buoys that could be used to recharge these robots. In order to recharge, buoys would need to have a way to produce power (solar, tidal energy, wind, etc). Then drones could dock at the buoy to recharge. 

We would be interested in communicating via email or Zoom with adults with expertise in any field related to our project. This includes but is not limited to the following:

• Underwater robotics and drone experts
• Experts on buoys
• Alternative energy experts

If you know someone who is an expert in this or you are an expert yourself please contact Dr. Cole so that we can reach out.