Endicott competes in the 2013 International SailBot Competition
06/18/2013
Endicott competed in its first SailBot competition, which was held in Gloucester, MA from June 9th to June 13th. It is a competition that challenges teams to create unmanned voats that can follow a course and steer around obstacles without human control. Endicott College was a sponsor of the event and hosted the teams on-campus. The competition included events in navigation, two fleet races, station-keeping, a long distance race of 10km, and a presentation of the boat itself.
Learning to create the robotic sailboat started in the Spring semester with 11 computer science students taking a special course. Dr. Michael Ocean was the faculty mentor and coach. Core team members were Shayne Lockard, Brenna Clark, Sam Creighton, Michael Fortin, Tim Lusardi, Jeff Street, and Jimmy Swanbeck. Their boat, the C Gull, placed 3rd in Fleet Race I and 1st in Fleet Race II, and with their combined times, placed 1st overall in the 1-meter fleet race, tying with Tufts University and Community Boating, Inc. of Boston. They also placed 3rd in the long distance race, completing one leg of a 10 km race that had 8 waypoints. The 2nd and 1st place boats completed 3 and 5 legs respectively. There were 9 boats in the 1-meter class, and Endicott finished 5th overall. The Endicott team also won the budget award for coming in at under $500, due in large part from the generous donation of the boat itself by Thomas Johnson. The award included MapleSim 6.1 and Maple 17 from Maplesoft, a sponsor of the race, which is mathematical and modeling software, that will be installed on one of the computers in the Computer Science Center in the new science building.
