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Women’s underwater robotics team makes waves in the desert

January 23, 2019

Partnership between ASU and Si Se Puede fosters diversity in STEM fields with pioneering all-female autonomous submarine team

In the midst of the Sonoran Desert, a group of Arizona State University engineering students gather every Monday night after classes to untangle wires, size down battery pods with a metal file and program a sensor system for an autonomous underwater robot that they designed and 3D printed.

They’re building a self-driving submarine for an international competition in July 2019, prototyping technology that can be used to detect underwater bombs, discover new deep-sea life, survey underwater wreckage and check the bottom of boats for fissures.

This ASU Polytechnic campus student organization is an all-female team called Desert WAVE (Women in Autonomous Vehicle Engineering), and their mentors believe that WAVE is only the second all-female underwater robotics team in the world (the first is at Texas A&M).

One of the 10 members of the team, which formed in fall 2018, is mechanical systems freshman Maria Espinoza. The U.S. Navy veteran was an avionics electronics technician stationed in Hawaii who worked on submarine hunters during her service.

She has years of experience working with electrical drawings, schematics and hardware — but she also has experience with what it can be like working in a male-dominated field.

“I understood how it was to be in the background,” she said. “You could just tell that when someone asked for help or needed advice, they always looked for the male perspective.”

ASU Polytechnic student works with a rotor

Maria Espinoza, a mechanical systems major, works with a part of the Desert WAVE team's underwater robot. Photo by Spencer Brown

Espinoza enjoys being on the Desert WAVE team because everyone is new and learning things together; it’s not as intimidating as other engineering environments.

“We can’t really hide behind someone else if we get intimidated,” Espinoza said. “We don’t want to be wrong. Here, if we’re wrong, we’re OK because we’re all learning together. I think it’s going to help us become more confident.”

In fact, opening the doors to more diversity in engineering was a big part of the origins of the team, which was launched by a partnership between ASU and the Si Se Puede Foundation. The Si Se Puede Foundation provides programs that strengthen communities, families and children. They do this largely through robotics clubs throughout the community.

The foundation primarily serves low-income, predominantly minority communities in Chandler, Phoenix and the surrounding areas. In addition to supporting the WAVE team, the partnership is also making possible the National Underwater Robotics Challenge on June 28–30, an open competition for kids and adults alike to compete at the pool at the ASU Polytechnic campus. The Si Se Puede Foundation is also part of the ASU Latino Partnership Scholars, which awards scholarships to deserving ASU students and prioritizes students studying STEM fields (applications are open now and due Feb. 1).

WAVE team mentor Faridodin “Fredi” Lajvardi, who is the vice president of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) initiatives for the Si Se Puede Foundation, has been working with young engineers for decades.

Fredi Lajvardi talks to the ASU women's underwater robotics team

WAVE team mentor Fredi Lajvardi, who coached the famous Carl Hayden High School robotics team that beat MIT in 2004, talks to the all-female ASU team on Jan. 7, 2019. Photo by Spencer Brown

Lajvardi is a retired high school science teacher whose Carl Hayden High School robotics team in West Phoenix famously beat MIT and other college teams in the 2004 Marine Advanced Technology Education Robotics Competition.

His experience throughout his career has been that if girls and women were given equitable opportunities, they excelled. But he also knew that those opportunities weren’t always there.

“I saw the statistics. I always knew as a male that they were bad. I just didn’t know how bad,” he said.

According to the Society of Women Engineers, more than 32 percent of women in STEM degree programs either switch majors or stop pursuing a degree, and only 13 percent of working engineers are women.

Many programs exist that encourage girls in secondary school to pursue STEM, but Lajvardi says that the drop-off in college and in the workforce is dramatic, and there are very few programs targeting women in college and on the job. The main reason cited for women switching majors or dropping out of the STEM workforce is the male-dominated culture.

“In my mind we had potentially great engineers — because you don’t know where that next great idea is going to come from — being shoved out,” he said. “We’re losing that opportunity to have extra people who could be contributing to our STEM workforce or our STEM knowledge base.”

The partnership between ASU and Si Se Puede led Lajvardi to collaborate with ASU engineering lecturer Daniel Frank, another mentor for the Desert WAVE team. They decided to start a program for women to enter international competition to build their skills, resume and resilience together.

Frank teaches an introductory engineering class at the Polytechnic campus and got to work right away recruiting women from his classes to join Desert WAVE.

“It gives them time to develop and grow so that hopefully … they’ll have the ability to navigate and hold their own in a male-dominated field,” Lajvardi said. “It’s an experiment.”

It’s an experiment that appears to be working. The team’s weekly meetings are a mix of designing parts to be printed and assembled, building the robot itself, figuring out electrical and software programming and talking through the stereotypes and bias that women sometimes experience in the field.

3D printing for the ASU underwater robotics team

The team designs and produces many of their robot's parts with a 3D printer. Photo by Spencer Brown

Human systems engineering freshman Jessica Dirks spent her winter break CADing (computer-automated design) parts for the robot with Solidworks software. She said her practical engineering experience has grown significantly in her time on the team. But she knows what it’s like for her skills to be doubted.

“I’ve had experiences where people have said, 'I’m going to double check your numbers.' The reason he cited for doing that was because I was female,” said Dirks of a prior experience in a group project.

Still, Dirks knows what she can do, and she has been helping her little brother build projects with her new 3D printing skills.

Desert WAVE team president Whitney Foster, an engineering freshman, is excited to put those newly printed parts to work. She loves the tactile element of soldering, filing parts and putting the robot together, and she loved taking apart a sample robot to see how it worked and using it for design ideas.

“I like taking the part out of the printer. ... I like the hands-on part. I can’t wait to actually put it together,” she said.

Foster was inspired to be an engineer by her grandfather, who worked for Boeing. She hopes to work in mechanical systems engineering, maybe in the aircraft industry. In the meantime, she’s excited that she gets the chance to experiment with many different aspects of engineering with her team, including learning about electrical engineering and computer programming.

All the work of the Desert WAVE team is leading up to the RoboSub competition, which will be held July 29–Aug. 4 at the San Diego Naval Base. There, robots from 20 international collegiate teams will compete in a 16-foot deep testing pool that mimics being out in the open ocean. In that environment, the self-driving robots have 20 minutes to shoot torpedoes at targets, drive through gates, pick up and manipulate objects, follow acoustic sound indicators to find objects and more.

All the WAVE team members can’t wait to see how their robot performs at the team’s competitive debut, especially since it has to navigate everything based on its autonomous programming. But regardless of how they perform, they’ve learned a lot along the way.

Foster has glowing words for her teammates about their work leading up to the RoboSub competition, not as women but as engineers who are doing their jobs.

“It doesn’t matter who it is,” she said. “It’s all about who gets it done.”

Top photo: The Desert WAVE team poses with a robot that Falcon Robotics donated for them to deconstruct and use as inspiration for their robot. Photo by Spencer Brown

Hannah Moulton Belec

Digital marketing manager , Educational Outreach and Student Services

480-965-4255

Inspiring people to make better lifestyle choices — through isotopes


January 23, 2019

Fitness goals are typically at the forefront of New Year’s resolutions for many Americans. A recent study from Arizona State University provides a new way to understand diet and exercise in a more holistic way that may help us reach those goals. 

Geologist and isotope chemist Gwyneth Gordon, of the School of Earth and Space Exploration and the Office of Knowledge Enterprise Development, along with co-author and researcher Amrita Rhoads, recently completed a study using breath and hair to determine metabolism and increase of calories burned during exercise. The surprising results of their study have been published in the journal Isotopes in Environmental and Health Studies. Amrita Rhoads and Gwyneth Gordon measure isotope ratios in a hair sample to estimate what participants typically ate. Photo courtesy ASU Download Full Image

An interdisciplinary approach to metabolism studies

Gordon, who has a background in geology and isotopes, worked with researchers from both the ASU Biodesign Institute and the ASU School of Human Evolution and Social Change to develop various methods to measure metabolism rates for this research. 

To conduct their study, Gordon and Rhoads recruited female participants who varied in age, body mass index, cultural affiliation, age and exercise history. For each participant, the researchers measured breath carbon isotopes before and after exercise to document metabolic increases with moderate exercise.

They then compared breath isotope measurements of metabolic increase with a smartphone-enabled indirect calorimeter called Breezing that was developed by Erica Forzani of the Biodesign Institute.

Participants also kept a log of what they were eating, which the researchers then compared to the analysis of their hair, providing baseline data about past eating habits. For the hair analysis, Gordon consulted with Kelly Knudson, of the School of Human Evolution and Social Change, who works on understanding human diet through hair isotopes.

“Hair isotopes are typically used to gain an understanding of lifestyles of archaeological populations,” Gordon explained. “but the same type of analysis can be used in modern populations as well.”  

The results

Using these techniques, the researchers found that participants were burning fat when they woke up in the morning, since they had been fasting during sleep. Then, during exercise, they started burning more carbohydrates. This was found for all participants, regardless of what they had eaten. 

“Initially, I had assumed that people would start burning fat during exercise,” Gordon said. “However, the data was showing the opposite of what we anticipated. The exercise we asked them to do was moderate — well within the U.S. Department of Health guidelines for physical activity — and it wasn't enough to burn through their carbohydrate stores.”

In the end, each participant was provided direct feedback about the impact of their exercise on their metabolism.

“This is a way to move metabolism research out of the academic laboratory into the life of the average person,” Gordon said.

Next steps

It is the hopes of Gordon and Rhoads that the results of this study will provide a new way to understand diet and exercise in a much more holistic fashion. They have combined techniques from geology, anthropology and cutting-edge sensors so that people can understand the impact of diet and exercise to manage weight.

People using the Breezing device can understand their personal metabolic response to exercise, and how it changes depending on intensity, type of exercise, recent diet and over the life course.

“This study represents a vision where people can have detailed information about how their lifestyle choices impact them, personally, in an objective way,” Gordon said. “This can inspire people to make better choices.”

The researchers also suggest that the analyses used in this study can help optimize all levels of athletic performance, from a middle-aged person who is working their way up to running a 5K to an Army recruit going through basic training.

“This kind of research doesn't require a big lab with a treadmill,” Gordon said. “Just a smartphone and a simple device.”

Co-author Rhoads, who is currently a bioengineering major at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, was a student at the Peggy Payne Academy at McClintock High School in Tempe when the research was conducted, and was involved in every aspect of the study. She helped write the grant proposal, conduct the research, analyze the data and write the research article for publication.

Gordon’s next steps are to pursue future funding to build on this research: “I think it's the type of use-inspired research that follows the mission and goals of ASU to work in collaboration with participants, to develop innovative global health solutions, and to work with our local community.” 

This research was funded by a seed grant of the ASU-Mayo Foundation Obesity Solutions program with support from the Virginia G. Piper Charitable Trust.  

Karin Valentine

Media Relations & Marketing manager, School of Earth and Space Exploration

480-965-9345