He’d had some experience getting an Android phone to link to a sensor via Bluetooth when he was in high school, but getting the same concept to work with the rover took some doing. Munro, meanwhile, added a very user-friendly twist to the robot, as operators can now check its battery level via their smartphones. “Tick populations are increasing, and nothing has been done about it in an environmentally friendly way,” St. The essay also had to explain the “why” of the project-how it would serve the public good. John went through approximately 20 revisions to meet IEEE’s exacting criteria. His job was to write an essay explaining how the rover works-and Squire noted that because of the complexity of the subject matter, St. John, who took the role of the technical writer. “When I came onto the project, I basically had to learn everything from scratch,” said St. John, was easy to find because Celentano and St.
“The workers-they’d essentially have to follow it around like a fussy toddler,” Squire noted.īecause the IEEE competition requires a team entry, Celentano recruited others to work with him on the project. Before, Squire explained, the rover went off course almost constantly. He also wrote stronger algorithms to control the rover’s speed and steering. Previous versions had run into trouble during field testing because the biologists in charge of the testing had trouble recognizing when the rover’s battery was low, so Celentano added an audible low-battery alarm. Squire explained that many of the changes Celentano made were designed to make the rover easier to use for non-engineers. “It was a good way to get acclimated to the design of the system, how the system works, and also working within a project where I didn’t see the original design,” he commented.
Jumping in the cold when he hadn’t been a part of the original design process was hard, so Celentano started with work on the base station that provides the navigation signal for the robot to follow. On the electrical side, though, there was plenty of work left to do. Jay Sullivan, professor of mechanical engineering. That initiative was done in the mechanical engineering department by Michael Landry ’18 and Matthew Davis ’18, working under the direction of Col. Recent work on the rover had included alterations to the mechanics of the wings, which trap ticks hiding on bushes. While pleased with how the rover had progressed over the years, Squire knew that there was definitely room for improvement. “We all worked extremely hard on this project and it is nice to know that there are others out there who appreciate our efforts.”īut national or international accolades were the last thing on anyone’s mind when Celentano approached Squire over 18 months ago seeking an Institute Honors project. “I cannot express how grateful I am knowing that our team will be able to represent the United States in this competition,” Celentano wrote in an email. There, they’ll be among four teams competing, with the others coming from South America, Europe, and Asia. 12-14 for the international competition, with their airfare and hotel costs paid for by IEEE. As a result, Squire and the cadets have been invited to Seville, Spain, Oct. In late April, weeks after the cadets had headed home for the remainder of the semester, Squire found out that the VMI group had won the national competition. John ’20, Eric Munro ’21, and Joseph Lieber ’23-took the tick rover, which is a robot designed to remove and kill ticks from people’s yards, and tweaked it further before entering the new and improved rover in a contest sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Over the winter, four cadets-Frankie Celentano ’20, Michael St. Now, despite the coronavirus pandemic this spring that’s cast a pall over post and all over the globe, the tick rover has won a national award, with the VMI team beating out teams from several nationally recognized research universities, and is headed to the international stage.
Jim Squire, professor of electrical and computer engineering, has provided research and learning opportunities for cadets.
For more than a decade, the tick rover, a longtime project for Col.