All-female Mesa robotics team pumped for contest
The 15 Fulton Schools students one the Desert Women in Autonomous Vehicle Engineering team — aka Desert WAVE — are gearing up for this summer’s Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International RoboSub competition in San Diego. They’re at work on the electrical engineering, computer programming and 3D printing tasks involved in preparing their robot, named Phoenix, to maneuver through an obstacle course. Equipped with two cameras and using passive and active acoustics to ping its location off of its surroundings, the robot can “see, hear and think on its own” as it navigates the course, said team member and software engineering major Andrea Schoonover, a junior majoring in software engineering.