City Underwater Robotics in MATE 2023 World Championship
CityU Underwater Robotics participated in the 2023 Maring Advanced Technology Education (MATE) ROV World Championship in St. Vrain Valley School District, Longmont, CO, USA, from 21 to 24 June 2023. It is the largest ROV challenge worldwide that engages a global community of learners.
MATE’s mission is to inspire and challenge students to learn and creatively apply science, technology, engineering, and math to solve real-world problems that strengthen critical thinking, collaboration, entrepreneurship, and innovation. This year, the MATE ROV Competition is highlighting the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development and inspiring the global community to embrace environmental, social, and governance (ESG) efforts to create a sustainable future on our ocean planet.
In the past few years, the COVID pandemic greatly affected the operation of the team including weakening the connections between new members and former members. This is the first year after the pandemic for the team to participate in a global competition and most of the members ahead to the USA were the first year to join MATE. Despite the difficulties we confronted in this year’s development, the team successfully recorded an inspiring new height of 4th place out of 25 teams that participated in the Explorer class of this year’s World Championship.
This result has proven the effort contributed by our members in the development of underwater robotics. MATE 2023 World Championship would be one of the most valuable moments and experiences for all of our members. We are looking forward to competing with all other teams from all around the world and archiving a higher result with our new robot together with our new design in next year’s MATE.