Photo By Daniel Daglis | A SeaGlide, or small-scale underwater glider, maneuvers in a tank at Naval Surface...... read more read more
As the world becomes more technologically advanced, so grows the need for experts to deal with its complexities. Today, there is somewhat of a shortage of American students pursuing careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). In response, the U.S. Department of Education began a STEM initiative to cultivate student interest in these fields by implementing STEM activities into school curriculums across the country.
Naval Surface Warfare Center, Carderock Division, in West Bethesda, Maryland supports the STEM initiative through several STEM outreach programs. Carderock has had significant success with their latest – and perhaps fasting growing – SeaGlide® activity.
With the popularity of SeaGlide® and its quick expansion to schools throughout the Washington, D.C., area, and amid recent interest from school programs all over the country including internationally in Beijing, China, Carderock’s Director of Technology Transfer Dr. Joseph Teter (Code 00T) said it was time to protect SeaGlide® with a trademark to preserve the integrity of the program as a U.S. Navy brand.
“We had just started producing glider kits a few years ago for STEM classes and Michael Britt-Crane was the lead person at Carderock that developed the sea glider as a STEM teaching aid. We wanted to make them widely available because SeaGlide® is garnering more and more interest from schools and organizations wanting to participate,” Teter said.
“The trademarks give us sort of quality control over future kits that are developed. In particular, and thinking forward for Carderock, if we go down the road of trademarking some of our software products, this gives us the same protection whereas we can control the versions that come out and make sure that they’re good and they satisfy and represent what we wanted to do with that software package. Trademarks prevent people from creating an inferior product and passing it off as belonging to Carderock and the Navy.”
SeaGlide® was started under a three-party Cooperative Research and Development Agreement between Carderock, the Naval Undersea Warfare Center and a foundation called the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI). According to Teter, AUVSI is making the kits; essentially assembling all the parts to prevent schools from having to go out and source each part from several different locations. Teter noted that being able to provide instructors and the student with everything they need to build their glider is part of the appeal.
The Department of the Navy now holds trademarks for the term “SEAGLIDE” without claim to any particular font style, size or color; and a branding logo which is a mark that consists of the term “cglide” with a line through the middle of the working “glide” above a swirl line that leads to a glider. The latter is the logo placed on the underwater glider kits that are assembled and distributed by AUVSI.
Dr. Teter worked closely with Office of Naval Research Intellectual Property Attorney Michael Badagliacca to register the trademarks through the United States Patent and Trademark Office. As a former engineer who made a career move to focus on the legal aspect of research and invention, Badagliacca is responsible for several of the Navy’s trademarks including “Navy SEALS”, the “America’s Navy” slogan, unit and command insignias and aircraft names like the more recent EA-18G “Growler.”
“A trademark is like a brand name. For this product we want the word to get out that there’s a neat underwater glider and now people know to ask for SeaGlide,” Badagliacca said. “When people request the Carderock underwater glider they know it’s called SeaGlide®, they know where to go, and they know exactly what product we’re talking about instead of someone else’s which might not be as good as the one we have.”
Michael Britt-Crane, a mechatronics engineer with Carderock’s Hydrodynamics and Maneuvering Simulation Branch (Code 863) pioneered SeaGlide® along with a hand-full of his fellow engineers at Carderock who volunteer part-time to work with students and educate instructors on bringing SeaGlide® to their schools.
While building an underwater glider containing a circuit board for soldering and programming, buouncy engines with syringes and moveable mass to manage buouncy and pitch, and ballast gliders for proper underwater flight, may seem too complex for learning basic electronics and physics; Britt-Crane insists SeaGlide® is the perfect STEM program.
“As an intro-level robotics activity where kids can get out of their books and get their hands dirty as kind of a starting point for building bigger and better robots in the future, it’s a perfect entry point to get broad-based understanding of how these systems work at a fundamental level,” Britt-Crane said.
Both of Britt-Crane’s parents were engineers, and he said that when he was in elementary school he would always say he wanted to be an inventor because he didn’t know the term engineer.
“That’s changed since then, but I think that’s illustrative of the kind of disconnect between the public knowledge of science and engineering and those of us who are in the profession, and that’s what we’re really working to try to improve,” Britt-Crane said.
While SeaGlide® is designed for high-school students, Britt-Crane and his team have worked with instructors teaching students as young as sixth graders and even had higher-level education organizations like the Marine Robotics Team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology build gliders.
Besides being an activity for students, Britt-Crane points out that there are many ways the SeaGlide® gliders align with the Navy’s interest when it comes to unmanned vehicles and unmanned vehicle systems. According to Britt-Crane, the completed gliders are fully functional as unmanned vehicles and have reached depths of 25 feet in Carderock’s basin. He said he is confident that they could go deeper; having done some pressure testing with the structure in super deep depths, but have not yet tested the motor at deep depths.
Having these small, cost-effective, gliders which consist of additive manufactured parts, Britt-Crane said the gliders can serve as test modules for the larger, more expensive drones that cross entire ocean floors.
“I think SeaGlide® would be an ideal platform to train operators of these drones. We can do the basic build in two days and we can do training for Navy personnel to really understand how these things work, and that’s really important.
“Our primary mission in regards to SeaGlide® is reaching as many schools and having plenty of exposure so that as many kids as possible are at least – even if they don’t go into STEM fields – getting a better understanding of engineering. It’s useful for us to have a well-educated public that understands science and engineering.”
As SeaGlide® continues to expand, Britt-Crane emphasizes that the program continues to look for new partners and work with as many Department of Defense labs as possible. Britt-Crane said the goal is to continue to reach as many kids as they can because STEM education in schools through programs like SeaGlide® will help inspire future engineers to secure the future of innovation.
| Date Taken: | 01.24.2017 |
| Date Posted: | 02.23.2017 15:05 |
| Story ID: | 224536 |
| Location: | WEST BETHESDA, MD, US |
| Web Views: | 170 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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