 Bot MATE-Tricks
Written by a member of Team MATE, Scott Cote’:
I was part of a team that used Parallax's Board of Education® carrier board and BASIC Stamp® 2 module to control our entry in the Discovery Channel's inaugural Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) Challenge. This was similar to Battle-Bots, but underwater, and by invitation only...
 My team, Team MATE, won the first-ever "ROV Challenge." The event was sponsored by the Discovery Channel and hosted by the Institute of Nautical Archaeology (INA) and Texas A&M's Offshore Technology Research Center. We defeated the U.S. Navy's NR-1 sub crew (the world's smallest nuclear submarine and research vessel), the Naval Postgraduate School, the INA, and the University of South Florida's Center for Ocean Technology during this competition.
Twenty people flew to College Station representing Team MATE that included students and instructors from Pacific Grove Middle School, Pacific Grove High School, Monterey Peninsula College (MPC), California State University Monterey Bay, University of California Santa Cruz, and Moss Landing Marine Laboratories. This team was headed by MPC staff: Scott Cote, Jill Zande, Frank Barrows and Tom Rebold.
 We had decided to use the Board of Education programming board after having worked with it in an earlier course taught by Tom at MPC. It ease of use couple with its exceptional abilities allowed us to work with a joystick and interpret its signals (resistance levels across sliding potentiometers) and use this signal to control 4 Minkota trolling motor control boards for both direction and speed. This control set-up enabled us to out-perform our competition in such events as the obstacle course, which we were able to complete in 3 minutes and 21 seconds, compared to the average of 10 minutes for our competitors!
The Team MATE Victory aired on the Discovery Channel September 1, 2002.
Visit their website for more info and more great pictures:
www.team-mate.org
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