Pensacola Catholic robotics goes to MATE ROV World Championship

June 19, 2024

17 3 minutes read

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Ace London is the Pensacola Catholic High School Robotics Team’s driver, and not just because he’s named “Ace London,” which sounds like a perfect drivers’ name.

No, each of the members of the Catholic Crusaders robotics team ‒ “Crubotics” they’ve named the team ‒ has multiple roles preparing their submersible robot, “CAT‒5,” for competition. And for the third year in a row, the team is competing in the MATE (Marine Advanced Technology Education) World Championship, Wednesday through Saturday in Kingsport, Tennessee. The team competes in the “Ranger” division for juniors and seniors.

The Crubotics team was invited to the MATE World Championship after finishing second in the Northern Gulf Coast Regional event at Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama in April.

Just days before leaving for Tennessee, the team members were in a room at CHS testing CAT‒5 ‒ “compact aquatic tool” (and an intense hurricane) ‒ and going over procedures and strategy.

So is CAT‒5 as powerful as its name suggests?

“We built an ROV ‒ it’s a remote operated vehicle, so it uses six propeller-driven motors to move through the water,” said Brandon Hoppe, 18, who is the team’s CEO ‒ teams operate as a business. “We have a claw system to grab things, we have a camera to see that we’re doing under there and a light. We’ve gone done 45 feet with this one but 85-foot tethered, so we probably could go deeper.”

Hoppe graduated from CHS in May, so this is his last event with the robotics team, which put in about 750 hours during the recent school year planning, building and testing CAT‒5.

“We’ve been doing this for seven years now and this is the third consecutive year,” said Dana Lupton, CHS STEM coordinator, chemistry teacher and robotics advisor. “They’ve put a lot of work and effort into this and worked well as a team.”

The 2024 Crubotics team members are Lucas Kasianov, Grant Robertson, Frederick Strawitch, Nate Flores, Mac McKinley, Carsyn Neff, Luke Foster, Caleb Bobe, Harry Remington, Dylan Nguyen, Nicole Peterson as well as London and Hoppe.

“I had an interest in robotics and had heard a lot about the program and I decided to join, which was a good idea,” said Neff, an incoming senior who hopes to study mechanical engineering after graduation. “I love it here. The team is great, and we work together really well.”

CAT-5 uses two vertical motors, six horizontal motors, and is configured to operate in various environments.

London, 17 and an incoming senior, started to explain deeper about the workings of CAT-5, going into highly-technical talk about linear actuators used to move the claws. Really technical talk.

He sensed my confusion and smiled.

“Do you know what that is?” he asked.

Of course I didn’t.

So, the conversation was steered to driving the vehicle. London definitely didn’t smile when I asked him if he got the CAT-5 driving gig because his named sounded like that of a hotrod racer.

He said the key to operating CAT-5 is “precise movements and good depth perception.”

“We’re not allowed to look over into the pool,” he said. “We actually have a camera inside and it’s high definition and we have to do all the operating through that.”

Using the camera to pilot the vehicle and dealing with depth perception is “pretty difficult,” he said, likening the experience to that of playing a first-person shooter video game.