Most students only see robots on TV or in movies like "I, Robot" and "Artificial Intelligence."
But Luis Gutierrez builds them.
Gutierrez, an engineering sophomore at the Polytechnic campus, is a co-founder of Sun Devil ROV, a club that builds — and competes — with robots they build themselves.
"You don't normally learn electronics in class the way you do by actually doing it physically," he said.
That's why Gutierrez spent his first semester at ASU gathering students with his same interests to form Sun Devil ROV, and his second semester working to build a robot for the National Underwater Robotic Competition, held Saturday at Chandler High School.
Gutierrez, along with fellow ROV-er Annalisa Regalado, were both members of the robotics team at Carl Hayden High School, where they often competed in challenges like the one held Saturday.
"I thought it would be a fun experience for some of the students who haven't built a robot or gone to a competition," Gutierrez said. "We decided to form a club here so we could compete."
With about five other students, the group created Proto, an underwater robot that could be used to measure temperatures and gather items. Proto is the Greek prefix for "first," since this was the group's first robot.
Because of funding troubles and the newness of the club, the group had a little less than a month to build its robot, Regalado said.
The group's first robot looked like a box with a silver outer shell, and green pool noodles on the outside for buoyancy.
For the competition, each group had to submerge its robot in a pool, about 13 feet deep. The robot had a mission to perform, which included collecting "missiles" from the bottom of the pool. Gutierrez said this mission was much like real-life missions in the ocean to excavate ships, like the Titanic.
Marcos Garcia-Acosta, a member of Honeywell Solutions, which helped organize the competition, said the overall goal is to get more students at the high school and college level interested in the sciences.
"The objective is that the robot works," he said. "But the point is that people get interested in technology."
While the Sun Devil ROV's robot didn't do quite as well as the team had hoped (Proto made it to the bottom of the pool, but didn't complete the mission), the team was happy with the results, said Michael Earley, an engineering sophomore and ROV team member.
"It was disappointing, but exciting," he said. "We were just stoked we had a robot to compete with."
Gutierrez agreed.
"I'm pretty happy," he said. "The team got to see what we need to work on for next year."
