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A UWA student team, ‘Spysea’, existing of students Jess Armstrong, Ray Barker and Geoffrey Channon, has been selected as the Australian winner of the Thales Project Arduino competition. The WA competition took place at UWA in March, hosted by Professor Thomas Braunl, of the Department of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering.

Louise Capper, Software Verification & Validation Manager and Australian Distributed Architecture Combat System Project Manager from Thales, said “Their entry was of a very high standard in a very competitive field of Australian university teams from University of Sydney, RMIT, UTS and UNSW. The Spysea team executed a successful project that displayed a strong set of engineering skills that impressed the judges.” SpySea is designed to be deployed from a naval boat to provide surveillance utilising the live camera feed.

The competition encompasses engineering student participants from some of the top Universities in 10 countries including; China, Canada, US, UK, Singapore, Middle East, France, Netherlands, Portugal and Australia.  The teams were challenged with building a Thales-inspired project using an Arduino open-source electronics prototyping platform, along with creating a promotional video pitching their project to the public and Thales judges.

The UWA Spysea team will now progress to the global final of the competition, and can be supported through a public voting system here .

Following this, a jury panel consisting of Thales employees from various parts of the business will decide on the final winner. The winning team will then have the opportunity to visit a Thales site of their choice.

Thales is an innovative and cutting edge business that links brilliant people from all over the world together to share ideas and inspire each other. In aerospace, transportation, defence, security and space.

“The competition is an excellent opportunity for UWA Engineering students to potentially positively impact the future on a global scale, while gaining hands-on experience that will in-turn better prepare them for careers of the future,” said competition winner Jess Armstrong.

To find out more or to sign up for next year’s competition visit https://www.thalesarduino.com/arduino

Media references

Chloe Leopold (UWA Faculty of Engineering Mathematical Sciences) (+61 8) 6488 2260