Hi! My name is Brianna and I’m working with Dr. Beth Orcutt on a research project that involves building a ROV (remotely operated vehicle). I was sitting on the dock with Alexa when we started joking about names for my ROV that I had just gotten to work that morning. After ten minutes we had a poem all about my ROV and this was the result!
by Brianna Adams
REU Student
Contributing Author
Red ROVer
by Brianna Adams & Alexa Williams
Red Rover, Red Rover, send Brianna right over
She came from the south
With a y’all in her mouth
And taught her robot to swim.
She soldered the wires,
But never grew tired
Red Rover, Red Rover, Red Rover.
From a plastic tool kit
She made the pieces fit
To measure dissolved O2
In the ocean so blue
And to measure the temperature too
Red Rover, Red Rover, Red Rover.
The motor burned through the wire,
Brianna grew ever so tired
And kicked the robot a bit.
But now the robot can swim,
So it all worked out in the end
Red Rover, Red Rover, Red Rover.
This ROV’s name is Red ROVer, which is where this poem came from. I’m from Corpus Christi, Texas, which explains the first three lines. It was definitely a fun, new, and educational experience building this ROV. I’ve never done any robotics or engineer work before and I learned how to do so many new things like soldering! A lot of pieces were a bit difficult to get them to fit; if the pieces were a couple centimeters bigger the build would have gone a lot smoother and faster. After building the ROV we went to test it out.
Everything worked for about fifteen minutes… then it just stopped working. We spent a couple days trying to figure out what was wrong before we found the problem. One of the motors had burned through the wires connecting to the batteries! We patched up the wires and put the ROV back in the water to see if it worked.
We now have a fully functional ROV! The next step is to attach temperature and dissolved oxygen sensors to the sides of the ROV and deploy it into the Damariscotta River Estuary to do some profiling.
Brianna Adams is an REU student from Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi. She is working with Dr. Beth Orcutt, marine microbial biogeochemist, at Bigelow Laboratory for 10 weeks this summer on an independent research project.