Youngsters build Autonomous Boats at CU-ICAR

A boat that drives itself and picks up trash from the ocean? That’s the stuff of science fiction, but it’s reality for a dozen lucky Upstate elementary, middle and high school students who are building their own autonomous boats in a Clemson University summer camp, reports the Clemson University Media Relations Department. The campers are led by automotive engineering professors Srikanth Pilla and Yunyi Jia at the Clemson University International Center for Automotive Research (CU-ICAR). Sponsored by Bosch, the Autonomous Boat Summer Camp for Ocean Conservation guides students as they engineer their own small self-driving boats and learn the importance of cleaning the oceans. The camp is intended to keep students interested in STEM subjects; science, technology, engineering and math, but they also get a lot of ecological and sustainability knowledge. During the camp students are learning about the harms of plastics, the basics of boat building, software coding and, of course, boat autonomy. Read more at www.clemson.edu.