Who are we?

We are Husky Marine, the ROV team for Mount Pearl Senior High. We have existed in many iterations, with Husky Marine being the most recent one, being formed in late 2023.

We will be competing at the regional MATE ROV competition for Newfoundland and Labrador in St. John's in May(?) 2025, and we hope to come to Alpena, Michigan for the world competition in June 2025.

We have won first place in previous regional competitions, like in 2016, 2019, and 2022.

What are our plans for this year?

Compared to the 2022 & 2023 competitions (where we competed as Husky Explorer), where we did very well, we didn't do so great at the 2024 competitions last May. We have since pinned this down to three reasons:

  1. Revamping our ROV
  2. Poor communication
  3. Treating our meetings more like a club and less like a team

Firstly, we used the same ROV with the same code for 2022 and 2023. It was originally designed for the (canceled) 2020 and 2021 competitions, meaning that by 2023, nobody who had designed the original ROV was on the team, as they had all graduated. In 2023 - our final year with our old ROV - we did very well in regionals, but since we were unfamiliar with our own code due to a lack of documentation and unfamiliarity with our own code, we did poorly at the world competition. This led us to plan a revamp of our code and ROV in 2024; not a bad idea on its own, but when combined with the other two problems, it was a spell for disaster. This time around, we hope to relieve ourselves of our other problems, so we can revamp our revamp and have an ROV better than any one we've made before! (we hope!!)

In preparation for the 2024 competition, there was almost no communication between sectors. The people who worked on the code had almost no involvement with the people who worked on fabrication. This led to us only finding out that our tether and our code would not work just weeks before the regionals, leading us to not have a working ROV until the day before safety checks. For the 2025 competitions, we hope to communicate better and regularly check in with all sectors of our team.

This was made all the worse by how we treated our meetings. At the start of the year, we accepted basically everyone who wanted to join, and we advertised this as a robotics club, not a robotics team. This led to a lot of dead weight on the team - dead weight we refused to get rid of until about a month before our competition. This year, we will be stricter with our team, and we will kick people who regularly no-show or come just to hang out.