by Joshua Davis
Lorenzo watched from the side of the pool and laughed. “It farted.”
Lorenzo’s joking didn’t lighten the mood. If these other teams were struggling, it meant that Carl Hayden should expect to have an even tougher time. The Explorer division was clearly punishingly difficult, but it also gave them a sliver of hope. If they could just get their robot to work and complete a single task, they’d be ahead of the teams whose robots shorted out. That meant they wouldn’t finish last.
The judges called MIT to the pool, and the college students lowered their compact, welded-aluminum ROV into the water. They quickly piled up points. They sped around the pool, locating objects and confidently investigating the interior of the mocked-up submarine. Locating the underwater pinger was one of the most challenging tasks. The event organizers had scattered four dummy pingers around the pool so that teams wouldn’t luck into picking the right one. MIT located it using their Knowles Acoustics MR-8406 underwater microphone.
They weren’t perfect though. They found the barrel with the leaking fluid and maneuvered up to it. This task was worth 15 points—more than any other. Since 3 points were subtracted for diluting the red sample fluid with pool water, the MIT team built a dual bladder system. When their pump was activated, it would fill one bladder and then a second. In theory, the pool water already in their sampling tube would flow into the first bladder, before the second bladder filled with unadulterated red fluid. The only problem: they couldn’t get their sampling tube into the barrel. The opening was too narrow. MIT gave up and sped away, confirming what Oscar had suspected: the task was impossible. Still, MIT had amassed 48 points, putting them in first place.
* * *
On the edge of the pool, Lorenzo was cramming tampons around Stinky’s circuit board, lining the edges with clumps of the cottony things. He and Oscar were operating on a few hours of sleep, but they were amped up.
“Put one over there,” Oscar ordered, pointing to a corner of the briefcase.
“I know what I’m doing,” Lorenzo said, ignoring Oscar. He felt that the tampons were his domain. He’d earned the right to put them wherever he wanted.
“We need Carl Hayden High School on deck,” one of the judges said over the PA system.
Their time had come.
“Okay, guys,” Allan told the kids. “You probably won’t have more than ten minutes before the leak shorts the controls, so go as fast as you can for the easy stuff.”
“Just get some points,” Fredi said. “That’ll put you ahead of a lot of teams.”
“We will,” Oscar said confidently.
The teachers watched the boys roll their equipment toward the “command shack,” a somewhat flimsy aluminum structure draped with a large, blue plastic tarp. It created a tented shelter that was enclosed on three sides.
“Boy, I hope this works,” Allan said.
“Me too,” Fredi responded.
The judges started a timer. Like the other contestants, Carl Hayden had five minutes to set up inside the shack and complete a safety check. Everybody burst into action. Oscar and Lorenzo rolled their monitor cart into position inside the darkened structure. Cristian carried a piece of particleboard that held the joysticks and topside electronics. Luis off-loaded Stinky onto the edge of the pool and handed the tether to Cristian, who connected it to the control system. Lorenzo fitted a purple balloon onto Stinky’s bilge pump. Oscar flipped the power switch.
Stinky was operational.
Leah Herbert checked a box on the score sheet beside the words Team is ready for the mission. Herbert was an ROV specialist at Oceaneering International, a company that builds and operates ROVs primarily for the oil and gas industry. She was flanked by judges Bryan Schaefer and William Kirkwood, two ROV specialists from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. Together, they would determine which tasks had been completed and award points accordingly.
“You guys are clear to get wet,” Herbert told them. “You’ve got thirty minutes.”
“Okay, Luis, let’s go,” Oscar said.
Luis lowered Stinky into the water, and Lorenzo prayed again to the Virgin Mary. He prayed that the tampons would work, but then wondered if the Virgin got her period and whether it was appropriate for him to be praying to her about tampons. He tried to think of a different saint to pray to but couldn’t come up with a good one. The whir of propellers brought him back to the competition.
Stinky careened wildly as it dived toward the bottom. Luis stood at the pool’s edge, paying out the tether cable. From the control tent, Cristian, Oscar, and Lorenzo monitored Stinky’s descent on their videoscreens. Via the robot’s front-facing camera, they could see the bright, sparkling poolscape that Stinky was moving through.
“There’s something there.” Cristian pointed. Down below, they could see a black object on an elevated tarp. It was the towfish, a mock-up of an underwater sonar device. Just seeing it was worth 5 points. The judges standing behind them in the command shack made a notation. With 5 points, they were tied for last place.
“Vámonos, Cristian, this is it!” Oscar said, pushing his controls too far forward. They were nervous and overcompensated for each other’s joystick movements, causing Stinky to veer off course. The towfish and tarp disappeared off their screens.
“Go back!” Cristian said.
“I got it.” Oscar corrected course and they sped down toward the object.
“You’re going too fast,” Cristian said.
Oscar hit reverse, and the propeller blast pushed the towfish off the tarp. They circled the tarp but could no longer reach the towfish.
“Let’s do the next thing,” Oscar said hurriedly. He didn’t want to waste any time.
“What’s that?” Lorenzo asked, pointing to an object on the screen. It looked like a barrel.
“It’s the fluid-sampling thing,” Cristian said.
“That’s last,” Oscar said. “Let’s keep moving.”
They rotated and saw the looming mass of the mocked-up submarine in the distance. So far, Stinky was holding up. The joysticks were functioning and the robot responded to all their commands. Oscar pushed forward and Stinky motored toward the structure. Cristian pulled back, and Stinky moved toward the surface.
“Let’s try to do the measuring,” Oscar said.
They managed to hook the loop of their tape measure onto the end of the submarine and reversed, spooling the tape out. When they reached the end of the sub, Lorenzo flicked on the black-and-white camera that was pointed at the tape measure. The screen was pure white.
“I can’t see anything,” Oscar said.
The camera exposure had been set when they were indoors at Scuba Sciences. During their practice run the previous day, it had been hazy in Santa Barbara. Now the sun was shining strongly, and the light overwhelmed the iris. The measurement was there—they just couldn’t see it.
Still, they got 5 points for deploying the tape measure. They motored over to the sub’s “periscope”—a tall plastic tube—and aimed their laser range finder at the bottom. Again, it gave a reading, but the image coming from the camera was blown out and they couldn’t see it. They got 5 points for being able to hover beside the periscope while gauging the depth even if they couldn’t actually report the measurement.
Most of the remaining tasks involved entering the submarine structure, a hazardous endeavor. Oscar was worried that Stinky could get snagged, ending their mission.
He checked the time: they had fifteen minutes left. “Let’s go back to the barrel.”.
“I thought we were going to do that last,” Cristian said.
“Let’s just try it.” Oscar spun the robot and headed back toward the barrel.
At Scuba Sciences, they usually couldn’t place Stinky’s bent copper proboscis into a half-inch pipe. The few times they did, it took dozens of tries over hours. Now the minutes were counting down on their mission. Cristian wasn’t sure it was worth trying, but Oscar was in charge.
The teens readjusted their g
rips on the joysticks and leaned into the monitors as Stinky approached the barrel that had frustrated the MIT team. The “barrel” was a one-gallon paint can painted with red and green camouflage. A half-inch tube protruded five and a half inches out the top. The control tent was silent. Now that they were focused on the mission, both Oscar and Cristian relaxed and made almost imperceptibly small movements with their joysticks. Oscar tapped his control forward, while Cristian gave a short backward blast on the vertical propellers. As Stinky floated forward a half inch, its rear raised up and the sampling pipe sank perfectly into the drum.
“Dios mío,” Oscar whispered, not fully believing what he saw.
“Hit the switches,” Cristian shrieked.
Lorenzo had already activated the pump and was counting out twenty seconds in a decidedly unscientific way.
“Uno, dos, tres, cuatro…,” he mumbled, until he got to twenty. He turned the pump off. They couldn’t see if the balloon had filled, so there was no telling if it had worked.
“Let’s get it to Luis,” Oscar said.
Oscar backed Stinky out of the barrel. They spun the robot around and piloted it back to Luis at the edge of the pool. He hauled Stinky out of the water, and Oscar, Cristian, and Lorenzo poured out of the command shack. The purple balloon sat plumply inside Lorenzo’s hacked-open milk container.
Oscar carefully removed the balloon. Cristian grabbed a plastic graduated cylinder to measure the fluid inside. Finding the barrel was worth 5 points. Collecting a sample and returning it to the control shack was worth another 5. They’d get 1 additional point for every hundred milliliters they collected—up to five hundred milliliters, for a total of 5 possible extra points. Oscar began to pour the liquid into the cylinder.
“Ciento, doscientos, trescientos,” Cristian said with mounting excitement as Oscar poured the fluid in. Finally: quinientos—five hundred milliliters. They had collected a complete, though slightly diluted, sample and would receive a wholloping 12 points. That brought them to 27 points so far, more than most of the other teams.
“Can we make a little noise?” Cristian asked Pat Barrow, a NASA lab operations manager supervising the contest.
“Go on ahead,” he replied.
Cristian started yelling. Luis stood there with a silly grin on his face, while his friends danced around him. They had done something that some of the best engineering students in the country had failed to accomplish.
“Let’s go, let’s go,” Oscar said, cutting the celebration short. They still had ten minutes left and he didn’t want to waste any more time. They were now in contention for a top spot. Luis quickly lowered the ROV back into the water.
Oscar piloted Stinky toward the submarine. They hadn’t yet explored the interior and there were a lot more points to be won. Cristian kept Stinky level as Oscar motored gingerly forward. The robot inched into the structure, trailing its tether. The walls were black and the passageway was treacherously narrow. The tether began to grind against the structure, pulling them back. Seconds ticked away and they weren’t getting anywhere.
“We’ve got to do something different,” Oscar said.
With a minute left, Oscar tried to make a tight turn, and the prop wash blew open a compartment, revealing a golden bell.
“That’s the captain’s bell,” Cristian shouted.
As the time ran out on their mission, the judges marked them down for another 5 points. That meant they had amassed 32 points. Not only had they not finished last, their mission score placed them in third place behind MIT and Cape Fear Community College. Everything would be determined now by the scores they received on their engineering review.
Fredi and Allan couldn’t believe it. They rushed to the command shack. Fredi snapped pictures as if the kids were celebrities. Allan grabbed Cristian and shook him like a tree.
“Congratulations,” Allan said. “You officially don’t suck.”
“Can we go to Hooters if we win?” Lorenzo asked.
“Sure,” Fredi said with a laugh. “And Dr. Cameron and I will retire too.”
THE AWARDS CEREMONY took place over dinner, and the Carl Hayden team was glad for that. Oscar felt as if he had run twenty miles with a fifty-pound rucksack, and even flavorless iceberg lettuce looked good to him. Their nerves had calmed. Fredi and Allan tried to temper their expectations. The teens felt that they had done great during the engineering review but, in reality, they probably hadn’t. The teachers told them that they had probably placed somewhere in the middle of the pack. They’d be lucky to get fourth or fifth overall. Privately, each of them was hoping they’d hold on to third. No matter what, they agreed, they were proud of what they had accomplished.
The first award was a surprise: a Special Prize that wasn’t listed in the program. Bryce Merrill, the bearded, middle-aged recruiting manager for Oceaneering International, an industrial ROV design firm, was the announcer. He explained that the judges had created this spontaneously to honor special achievement. He stood behind a podium on the temporary stage and glanced down at his notes. The contestants sat crowded around a dozen tables. Carl Hayden High School, he said, was that special team.
The guys trotted up to the stage, forcing smiles. It seemed obvious that this was a condescending pat on the back, as if to say, “You did well, considering where you came from.” They didn’t want to be “special”—they wanted third. It signaled to them that they’d missed it.
They returned to their seats, and Fredi and Allan shook their hands.
“Good job, guys,” Fredi said, trying to sound pleased. “You did well. They probably gave you that for the tampon.”
“Hey, you got an award,” Allan pointed out. “Everybody back home is going to be really proud of you.”
Allan and Fredi tried to look on the bright side. Nobody had expected them to get any award. It was actually pretty amazing.
Oscar nodded. Allan was right. The whole team had come farther than even they had expected. Maybe they hadn’t placed at the top of the rankings, but everybody now knew that they were talented engineers. That was a pretty remarkable accomplishment on its own.
“Come on, guys,” Oscar said encouragingly. “This is great. For the rest of our lives, we can say we won an award here.”
Lorenzo decided it was fun just to have gotten up onstage and have everyone clap for him. He’d remember that forever.
THE CEREMONY WAS coming to an end. A few small prizes were handed out (Terrific Tether Management, Perfect Pickup Tool), and then Merrill moved on to the final awards: Design Elegance, Technical Report, and Overall Winner. The MIT students shifted in their seats and stretched their legs. While they had been forced to skip the fluid sampling, they had completed more underwater tasks overall than any other team. The Cape Fear team had posted the second-highest number of points during the underwater mission. They sat across the room, fidgeted with their napkins, and tried not to look nervous. The students from Monterey Peninsula College looked straight ahead. They’d placed fourth behind Carl Hayden in the underwater trials. They were the most likely third-place finishers. It would all come down to how the judges graded the teams’ oral and written presentations. The guys from Phoenix glanced back at the buffet table and wondered if they could get more cake before the ceremony wrapped up.
Then Merrill leaned into the microphone and said that the ROV named Stinky had captured the design award.
“What did he just say?” Lorenzo asked.
“Oh my God!” Fredi shouted. “Stand up!”
It didn’t make any sense to Lorenzo. There was nothing pretty or elegant about their robot. Compared to the gleaming machines other teams had constructed, Stinky was a study in simplicity. The PVC, the balloon, the tape measure—in each case they had chosen the most straightforward solution to a problem. It was an approach that grew naturally out of watching family members fix cars, manufacture mattresses, and lay irrigation piping. To a large swath of the population, driveway mechanics, box-frame builders, and gardeners did not repr
esent the cutting edge of engineering know-how. They were low-skilled laborers who didn’t have access to real technology. Stinky represented this low-tech approach to engineering.
But that was exactly what had impressed the judges. Lisa Spence, the NASA judge, believed that there was no reason to come up with a complex solution when an elementary one would suffice. She felt that Carl Hayden’s robot was “conceptually similar” to the machines she encountered at NASA.
The guys were in shock. They marched back up to the stage and looked out at the audience with dazed smiles. Lorenzo felt a rush of emotion. The judges’ Special Prize wasn’t a consolation award. These people were giving them real recognition. He thanked Merrill and headed back to his seat with the others. Now they’d really have something to talk about in Phoenix.
Before they could get off the stage, Merrill announced that they had won another prize: the Technical Writing Award.
Lorenzo didn’t know what was happening. It seemed impossible that they would win three awards, particularly one for writing. Us illiterate people from the desert? Lorenzo thought. He looked at Cristian, who had been responsible for a large part of the writing. Even Cristian was amazed. To his analytical mind, there was no possibility that his team—a bunch of ESL students—could have produced a better written report than kids from one of the country’s top engineering schools.
Merrill congratulated them. They had just won two of the most important awards. It was astonishing, but now the room was ready for the announcement of the top three overall finishers. The Carl Hayden kids returned to their seats. They were now a highly decorated underwater-robotics team. It had been an amazing run, something they’d never forget.
Merrill began the countdown. “Third place goes to Cape Fear Community College,” he said. There was a round of applause. Sea Devil 3, their ROV, was a work of art with robust capabilities and had amassed the second-highest number of mission points. The Carl Hayden kids were surprised. They had assumed that Cape Fear would grab second place. It was a given that MIT would win the championship, so they figured that Monterey Peninsula College had slid into second place. They were a solid team that had performed well underwater and likely aced the engineering review. Carl Hayden figured they might have gotten as high as fourth place. That was pretty exciting.