world championship competition<\/a> in Springfield, Ohio, in June against 10 other teams. The Rochester team finished fifth overall. And the telemetry system won the competition\u2019s Innovation Award.<\/p>\n\u201cThat motor breakdown really gave us a signal that we needed to focus more on data collection from sensors, on instrumenting the boat so we actually knew what was going on,\u201d says Dalke, a recent graduate in computer science who has been a member of the team for four years.<\/p>\n
With the new system, team members Dalke, Andrew Gutierrez \u201919, Ben Martell \u201919, Melanie Almenas \u201922, and Mark Westman \u201920 were able to monitor a variety of sensors such as GPS, motor temperature, battery voltage, and solar power generation, all in real time, both on the boat and on shore.<\/p>\n
For example, \u201cDuring the endurance race, both the driver on the boat and team members on shore were able to look at how much power the boat was consuming, what the battery status was, along with other readings, and then decide \u2018let\u2019s speed up a little bit,\u2019 or \u2018let\u2019s slow down this lap.\u2019 We were continuously tweaking our speed, and that let us maximize the distance that we went\u2014a little over 16 miles,\u201d Dalke says.<\/p>\n
\u201cI expect multiple other teams to borrow this idea for next year\u2019s competition,\u201d says Ethan Burnham-Fay, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and faculty advisor for the team.<\/p>\n
In addition to the Innovation Award, the team took home first place for this video presentation explaining how the group came up with the telemetry system, and also won the award for Most Improved Team.<\/p>\n