In preparation for an annual underwater robotics competition, RoboSub, a faculty member at Arizona State University (ASU) partnered with the VP of STEM Initiatives at the Si Se Puede Foundation to start a new collegiate all-woman robotics team. The two began recruiting members for the team and ended up with mostly freshman students who had little to no prior experience with robotics. RoboSub is one of the most prestigious robotics competitions where teams from around the world design robotic submarines that need to operate for as long as 20 minutes without human intervention. Many teams compete year after year, so the newly formed team of rookie students had a lot of catching up to do. The team chose the name Desert WAVE (Women in Autonomous Vehicle Engineering) because they’re from the Sonoran Desert and they wanted to disrupt the status quo, or "make waves” in the engineering field, which predominantly consists of men.

The founding mentor from the Si Se Puede Foundation was a retired coach for Falcon Robotics, a team from Carl Hayden Community High School in Phoenix, AZ. His students made headlines in 2004 when they competed in the MATE ROV Competition as a team of four undocumented citizens and beat the team from MIT. The success of these students has since been memorialized as a book and a movie.

Falcon Robotics donated their old submarine to Desert WAVE who took the machine apart to learn how it was built and to repurpose some components. They spent the next several months designing and building their new submarine which they named Phoenix, both for the city from which the team is from and for the mythology of a phoenix rising from its ashes. In this case, the new submarine, Phoenix, was created from the deconstruction of the old Falcon Robotics submarine.

Desert WAVE dissecting Falcon Robotics' old submarine.

Phoenix The Submarine.

During the first few days at the competition, the other teams were friendly toward Desert WAVE, but it became clear that no one saw them as a serious threat, mainly because Phoenix was limited in what she could do. She didn’t possess a torpedo launcher nor a grabber mechanism, so there were certain challenges in which she couldn’t earn points. Many of the challenges were also designed to require cameras and vision software in order for the submarine to determine where it was and where it needed to go. Unfortunately, the team never had the opportunity to finish writing the vision software. When the judges interviewed the team, they asked what Phoenix did when she got lost. The team replied, “She doesn’t get lost.” At first the judges were shocked, thinking that their response was arrogant, but then they explained that since Phoenix couldn’t “see,” she could never really get lost since she never knew where she was to begin with.

To compensate for Phoenix’s lack of sight, the team used two ancient navigation techniques combined with cutting edge sensors to help Phoenix get where she needed to be. The two navigation techniques were dead reckoning and surveying. Dead reckoning s a method of using an object’s past location, speed, direction, and some elapsed time to determine its current position. Surveying is a way to determine the two-dimensional and three-dimensional distances between points and the angles between them. Since the locations of game elements were always moving, Desert WAVE was always the first on-site every morning to start surveying.

In addition to these techniques, Phoenix was fitted with a fiber-optic gyroscope and a doppler velocity log. A fiber-optic gyroscope uses the interference of light which has passed through an optical fiber to track the change in an object's orientation, similar to a mechanical gyroscope. A doppler velocity log measures an object's velocity in water by measuring the characteristics of sound waves. The combination of these techniques and technologies allowed Phoenix to consistently navigate distances of hundreds of feet during each of her runs.

Phoenix used dead reckoning and surveying to "see".

After the team’s bold claim that Phoenix never got lost, every time Phoenix was in the water, the judges would wander over to see just how reliable her navigation was. Each time Phoenix reached her target, the judges would just shake their heads in disbelief. Over time, as Phoenix consistently performed well in her runs, other teams began to see Desert WAVE not just as a rookie team from the desert, but as a team they might lose to. Despite having to deal with a flooded battery hull just hours before, Phoenix saved her best run for the finals, earning enough points to be crowned the number one team in the country, and the 3rd best team in the world!

Phoenix's last run.

In addition to their amazing achievements at the competition, Desert WAVE was featured in an article published by Good Morning America. Their story was heard around the world and it inspired many! One woman from Idaho said that after hearing their story, she now wanted to start her own robotics team. Students in Egypt said that their story inspired them to go to ASU for graduate school. One older local woman said that although she didn’t have much money to support the team financially, she wanted to have them all over for dinner. And speaking of the local community, a number of parents reached out to the team saying how much Desert WAVE’s story meant to their young daughters. Understanding the importance of being positive role models in their community, Desert WAVE invited the girls to one of their meetings and gave them the VIP treatment. The girls got to meet their heroes, see Phoenix up close, and had the opportunity to tell Desert WAVE about all of the ideas for inventions that they had.

Desert WAVE and kids from their community.

Daniel Frank is an Assistant Teaching Professor at Arizona State University. During the pandemic he began to write short stories recounting the tales of different robotics teams he had previously worked with. He shared these stories with his team to encourage them to keep working hard during such uncertain times and has graciously shared this one with EngineerGirl.

If you have any inspiring stories of your own to share, we'd love to hear about and post them! Please share them with EngineerGirl@nae.edu.