Clatsop Community College
For Immediate Release: July 12, 2006
Contact: Pat Keefe, 338-2434; pkeefe@clatsopcc.edu

CCC Students Earn Third Place in National Remote Operated Vehicle Competition

Left to right: Instructor Pat Keefe, students Rachel Steiner, Phillip Russel and Jonathan Michalsky

Three Clatsop Community College students traveled to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas last month to compete in the 2006 National Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV) competition. CCC students earned third place in the competition, trumping MIT and many other noted technological schools from around the nation and world, including contestants from China and Canada.

Under the direction of physics instructor Pat Keefe, the team combined skills learned through the physics and technical writing classes at the college to build the winning ROV. Engineers Jonathan Michalsky and Phillip Russel built an ROV that was able to successfully complete missions at a forty-foot depth. These missions simulated activities that ROVs perform off the California and Gulf coasts, such as repairing oil lines, and retrieving and attaching power cables. Many of their competitors’ robots sunk or were unresponsive.

Rachel Steiner
A tense silence prevailed over the students’ thirty-minute competition time, as they operated the ROV while looking only at a screen that provided footage from their robot. The success or failure of the mission depended on the reliability of their cameras, and the management of their tether - their seventy-foot lifeline - regulated by Rachel Steiner.

After winning third place among the 16 schools in the advanced competition, the team again made CCC proud by bringing home a trophy and an award for “Excellent and Elegant ROV Design.”

A small part of the competition included writing a technical paper. The CCC students who helped write this paper are Kim Muessing, Melody Harrison-Wooton, Crystal Chandler, Kellan Frank and Jarrod Jackson.

The success of the CCC ROV team would not have been possible without the support of Jensen Communications, Englund Marine & Industrial Supply and the Astoria Aquatic Center.

Next year’s ROV Competition will be held at St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada.
For more information about the ROV competition, contact Pat Keefe (503) 338-2434.