ROV MAKER was invited by Kaohsiung Municipal Rueisiang High School to present underwater robots. This presentation was given to a collaborative lesson planning workshop on emerging information technologies. Specialists from various fields are invited to share their works and hands-on experiences with high school teachers. The workshop serves as a knowledge platform to assist teachers in accessing new knowledge and bringing it into high school education.
The principal of Rueisiang High School gave importance to the presentation and made an opening talk. Involved in the workshop were two high school students interested in underwater robots as well as high school and elementary school teachers.
The presentation includes: (1) the introduction of ROV, (2) the market of ROV DIY, (3) the open-source platform and well-known businesses regarding ROV, (4) the development of Voyager II, and (5) the demo of Voyager II.
The development of Voyager II dealt with the practical experiences working with the hardware, software, machine and assembly. Difficulties certainly came up along the way and problems fortunately were worked out. Our solutions were inspired to a certain degree by those on the international platform for ROV. Mentions were also made about the great products by international businesses that specialize in ROV DIY, such as OpenROV (Sofar) and Blue Robotics. ROVMAKER firmly believes that all these solutions or products are excellent. What works in the ROV field is whether or not the product can speak to the customer on an emotional level, instead of whether the product is good or bad.
As for the demo of Voyager II, Rueisiang High School kindly offered its swimming pool to let the workshop participants try out Voyager II. Both the teachers and students were first-time users and they found it easy to operate the underwater robot simply through the joystick and the depth-control function. They were also impressed with OpenCV. This function allows users to execute basic image processing and restore the input as video files. It is noteworthy that the files contain sensor data and time stamp information, which is of great use for subsequent analyses.
ROV MAKER is thankful to Rueisiang High School for the opportunity to share the ROV development with educators in southern Taiwan. ROV MAKER is committed to developing ROV and looks to promote the underwater robot to the campus in Taiwan.