科普 Graduate Hones Real-World Skills in Submarine Competition
图片来源:Sidra Gibeault
“我是一个有计划的人,Sidra Gibeault说, a 2020 graduate of 科普 with a degree in Electrical Engineering.
That’s probably just one reason Sidra was chosen to co-lead 科普’s RoboSub team for 2020 along with Joseph Iorio, a 2020 科普 graduate with a degree in 机械工程. RoboSub is an international competition sponsored by the U.S. 海军研究局 that challenges universities around the world to create an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) that can perform a series of specified tasks underwater. The underwater vehicle must demonstrate its autonomy by navigating through an underwater course to touch buoys, 驾驭航道, 放下一个记号笔, 火鱼雷, 检索对象, 表面, 然后释放对象.
Designing an AUV for the competition requires months of design work and testing by a multidisciplinary team of Electrical Engineering, 机械工程, 和计算机科学专业的学生. 为了竞争本身, teams gather once a year for a week to demonstrate their vehicles with the hope of being one of the six teams to qualify for the finals. 在决赛中, each team is given a nail-biting 20 minutes to put their subs in the water, 让他们试一试, 看他们是沉是浮.
Sidra first learned of the RoboSub competition during her second year at 加州大学洛杉矶分校. She had begun her studies at the age of 13 through the university’s Early Entrance Program, 旨在让年轻人, highly gifted students to enroll in college as full-time students. Sidra admits she wasn’t quite ready for college at that age. 仍然, she took it to heart when one of her professors suggested that she look at some extracurricular activities so she’d have something on her resume beyond academics.
“What drew me to RoboSub was how hard it was going to be to build a submarine,Sidra说。. “I liked the idea of figuring out how to do something so complex. As I got into it, I also became hooked on the feeling of achieving things.”
据博士说. 马克Tufenkjian, Professor and Chair of the Department of Civil Engineering, “为RoboSub竞赛建造一个AUV, students must get outside their fields of study and their comfort zones, 学习如何利用彼此的专长, 一起工作. The whole year is taxing, and the weeklong competition is grueling, both physically and emotionally. 但是学生们很喜欢. 这为他们未来的成功奠定了基础.”
作为2020年RoboSub团队的共同领导, Sidra and Joseph tackled the monumental task of organizing and managing the work of a multidisciplinary team of 30-40 students. They had both been team members for the previous three years and had learned a few things they believed could improve the experience for team members and result in a better design. 说锡德拉湾, “根据我们过去的经验, we knew that team members want to get engaged in hands-on work from the beginning. No one joins the RoboSub team to do research and write papers. So, we started out with workshops on topics like learning how to use the design software and completing small tasks that people could do right away. 这很有帮助.”
他们还把通讯作为头等大事, holding team meetings every week and making sure that everyone got a chance to present what they were working on to the entire team. “It’s hard to be productive when you don’t know what’s going on,Sidra说。.
This past year was to be 科普’s fourth entering the RoboSub competition, 540美元的捐款使参与成为可能,从美国获得了2000万美元的资助.S. 海军研究局. 不幸的是, the team’s work was halted when California issued shelter-in-place orders in March due to the coronavirus pandemic and team members could no longer gather to work on the project together. “We had a week left of manufacturing that was supposed to be completed at the end of March and testing should have started in April,Sidra说。.
The RoboSub in-person finals typically take place in August. 但是在五月, all in-person activities of the RoboSub competition were cancelled and teams were invited to submit documentation of their designs and progress online. 撰写本文时, a date and time for an end-of-summer virtual gathering to announce prizes and prepare for 2021 had not been announced.
Despite the disappointment of having the in-person RoboSub 2020 competition cancelled, Sidra has no regrets about the work she and other team members put in on the project during the year. “I think being involved in activities like RoboSub make you more desirable after graduation because you gain skills that are valuable in the workplace,Sidra说。. “I learned a lot about leadership, managing people, and how systems work. I would encourage all students to take on extracurricular activities that give them these kinds of skills.”
现在18岁, Sidra今年5月毕业, had a summer internship at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, and this fall heads off to the University of Maryland, College Park to start a PhD program in Electrical and Computer Engineering with full funding and a paid position as a graduate teaching assistant.