News photo by Grace Walker On Friday, the Alpena High School (AHS) Underwater Research Robotics (UR2) team shares their robot that they will be taking to the world championship at the Great Lakes Maritime Heritage Center in Alpena.

ALPENA — A month before going to the world championship, the Alpena High School (AHS) Underwater Research Robotics (UR2) team shared a sneak peak of their robot to an audience on Friday at the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary (TBNMS) Great Lakes Maritime Heritage Center in Alpena.

This is the 12th time the team is going to the world championship since starting in 2009.

“We did so well last year and I really hope to go back and defend our titles that we won and to go get the titles that we didn’t get last year,” Lydia Thomson, the CEO of UR2, said. “We’ve been doing this for 12 years and…we took one of the podiums, but it’s time to take all of them.”

The Marine Advanced Technology Education (MATE) Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) Competition is a competition created by the Marine Tech Society that works to encourage kids to solve real world skills through engineering.

The teams essentially create robots that can go underwater and complete different challenges in a certain amount of time. This year, teams had to create robots that operate under extremely cold conditions and, in some sort of way, help understand environmental challenges being faced in extremely cold places.

This year, the team will compete against 80 different teams from 27 different countries in Newfoundland, Canada Lydia Thomson said.

“It’s really going to be a great time,” Gunner Moe, UR2 team member, said. “It looks like a great environment up there.”

This year, the UR2 robot was designed to identify European Green Crabs, an invasive species that are considered a threat to the Great Lakes and other coastal ecosystems. The robot has a camera that takes photos, and through a software system, detects whether certain crabs are considered a European Green Crab or native. Lydia Thomson said most of the robot is made with either recycled or handmade parts.

Beyond MATE, the team works with TBNMS to do different projects.

Bob Thomson is a STEM teacher at Thunder Bay Junior High School and advisor for the UR2 team. He said through the past 20 years, the program went from teaching students about environmental issues to learning how to build robots to do environmental research with the help of TBNMS.

He said he has worked with many of the students since middle school and some as early as third grade.

“We don’t advertise, we don’t go looking for kids, they just come,” Bob Thomson said. “We’re always excited about Worlds and this team is no exception.”

The partnership between the school and TBNMS has allowed students within the program to be part of bigger projects like developing technology that researches how the increasing issue of acidification in the Great Lakes affects the ecosystem.

“We’re all here because we want to do the same thing and we want to achieve our goals, and I think by everyone cooperating and collaborating, we’re doing that just how we want to,” Moe said.

Grace Walker can be reached at walke1ge@cmich.edu. This story was produced by the Michigan News Group Internship Program, a collaboration between WCMU Public Radio and local newspapers in central and northern Michigan. The program’s mission is to train the next generation of journalists and combat the rise of rural news deserts.