Help develop autonomous vehicles to explore the ocean floor. The Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE is a $7 million global competition to advance deep-sea technologies for autonomous, fast, and high-resolution ocean exploration. Teams will have a limited period of time to explore an area of the ocean, producing a map of the sea floor and images of biological, archaeological, and geological features of the ocean environment. Teams must be registered by June 30th, 2016.

To learn more and participate, visit: https://oceandiscovery.xprize.org/

To stay up-to-date on this project:
• follow twitter.com/xprize

photo by Jesuit Robotics

An international competition for elementary through college level students to design and build underwater remotely-operated vehicles (ROVs) to tackle missions modeled after scenarios from the ocean workplace. This year’s competition theme highlights the role that ROVs play in exploring and documenting shipwrecks, studying sinkholes, and conserving national maritime heritage sites. Regardless of the theme, the competition consists of underwater mission tasks, technical reports, engineering presentations and poster displays. 

The 13th annual MATE international competition will take place June 26-28, 2014 at the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary in Alpena, MI, USA. The competition connects students and educators with employers and working professionals. Working professionals have the opportunity to act as team mentors, students can explore potential careers, and employers are able to evaluate students as potential employees.

Project owners + coordinators:
Jill Zande, competition coordinator

To learn more and participate March 1, 2014, visit: marinetech.org/rov-competition

To stay up-to-date on this project:
• follow twitter.com/matecenter

2013 International MATE ROV Competition from MATE Center on Vimeo.

OpenROV is an underwater robot that you can build yourself to explore underwater caves, oceans and lakes up to 25m in depth, with an eventual goal of up to 100m. OpenROV can be used for an array of exploration and research. From hunting for meteorites on the seafloor to monitoring plastic pollution in the ocean, the larger community of OpenROV users aim to increase research for a wide variety of underwater-related domains.

An ROV is a remotely operated vehicle that can move forward, backward, rotate and change depth. The OpenROV’s movements can be controlled from your computer screen. You can build an OpenROV from scratch or by using a pre-purchased kit ($849 for the full kit or  $45-$245 for individual components).

Project owners + coordinators:
Eric Stackpole, co-founder
David Lang, co-founder

To learn more and participate, visit: https://openrov.com

To stay up-to-date on this project:
• follow twitter.com/openrov
• read blog.openrov.com
• join forum.openrov.com
• see instagram.com/openrov_hq
• connect with facebook.com/openrov