IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - December 2018 - 116

Figure 3. The various boats constructed by the summer camp students. Pictured in the lower center photo are students from the
graduate student competition. (Photos courtesy of Adhiti Raman.)

Figure 4. Students compete in the final showdown. (Photo
courtesy of Aditya Yerra.)

robotics among graduate, undergraduate, high school, and middle school students. In 2017, the Bosch Community
Fund supported an autonomous boat
competition among Clemson's graduate-level students at CUICAR. In that
competition, led by Dr. Jia, 71 students
were divided into 18 groups, each of
which built an autonomous boat
equipped with cruise control, boundary
tracking, and collision avoidance using
the sensing, signal-processing, and filtering techniques and advanced control
methods taught by Dr. Jia in his automotive electronics course (Figure 1).
The success of this event led to the
Ocean Conservation Summer Camp,
focused on autonomous boat building
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IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

Figure 5. (From left) Dr. Srikanth Pilla, Dr. Yunyi Jia, and Dr. Uwe
Neumann (vice president of Bosch Rexroth) listen to a student
poster presentation. (Photo courtesy of Aditya Yerra.)

and aimed at local middle and high
school students during the summer
of 2018 (Figures 2-4). Dr. Jia, the advisor of Clemson University's IEEE RAS
Student Branch Chapter, teamed up
with Dr. Srikanth Pilla, advisor of the
local Clemson Society of Plastics Engineers (SPE), to organize this event.
Supported by the Bosch Community Fund, this collaborative, monthlong camp included lectures on
boat-building materials and sustainability, hands-on tutorials about electronics system integration, Arduino
programming, and boat controls (Figure 5). Students 11-17 years old created 13 different autonomous boat
designs and competed in scenarios to

december 2018

clean up plastic debris floating in the
oceans. Encouraged by the success of
this event, Clemson University's IEEE
RAS and SPE Chapters hope to make
this an ongoing summer activity,
improved and enhanced in future
edtions. For more information, visit
http://newsstand.clemson.edu/mediare
lations/youngsters-learn-value-ofpreserving-earth-while-buildingautonomous-boats-at-cu-icar/.
Reference
[1] A. Raman. (2018). Enabling graduate engineering students with proficiency in mobile robotics.
engrXiv. [Online]. Available: https://engrxiv.org/
fsqcz/. doi: 10.31224/osf.io/fsqcz

http://newsstand.clemson.edu/mediarelations/youngsters-learn-value-of-preserving-earth-while-building-autonomous-boats-at-cu-icar/ http://newsstand.clemson.edu/mediarelations/youngsters-learn-value-of-preserving-earth-while-building-autonomous-boats-at-cu-icar/ http://newsstand.clemson.edu/mediarelations/youngsters-learn-value-of-preserving-earth-while-building-autonomous-boats-at-cu-icar/ http://newsstand.clemson.edu/mediarelations/youngsters-learn-value-of-preserving-earth-while-building-autonomous-boats-at-cu-icar/ https://engrxiv.org/fsqcz/ https://engrxiv.org/fsqcz/

IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - December 2018

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