OMRO, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) — Students at Omro High School are hoping to make the ice a little safer. They’ve invented a remote controlled robot that can detect ice thickness.
The robot, which they’re calling the Ice Geospatial Guided Instrument, or “IGGI” for short, uses radio waves to detect how thick the lake ice is.
“It’s really exciting, after you see your prototype actually work,” said Delilah Larsen, Omro High School senior.
The group of students has been awarded thousands to create an ice safety device. The school received the $10,000 Lemelson MIT InvenTeam grant, after presenting the students’ idea to MIT’s program.
“The kids wanted to build a safety device to test the thickness of ice out on our local bodies of water,” said Robert Turner, Omro High School science and engineering teacher.
The road to accomplishing that wasn’t without some major bumps.
Everything was running smoothly for the Omro class, until the pandemic hit. After that, everything was done virtually, including troubleshooting.
“It took me a lot of trials to figure out how to make like the spool gear and all those gears for that, and to make sure it works!” Larsen said.
“You’re pinging a signal down with a light wave, and it’s going through the ice and pinging back off of the water surface, ” Turner explained. “Then, you’re measuring that distance; how long it takes for that wave to go down and bounce back up. You can calculate the depth of the ice from that.”
And that’s not all it does. The data gathered from the device is then shared online for others to view in real-time.
“I think it would be really useful, especially for the people that like do ice fishing, or spend their everyday living out on the ice. It’d be a lot safer,” Larsen said.
Don Herman, founder of Sunk? Dive and Ice Service in Oshkosh has pulled enough cars out of water to know a thing or two about the dangers of thin ice.
Herman says the students’ ice safety invention could make his job a whole lot easier.
“Sometimes I drill a hundred holes, just to check the ice all the way to the vehicle, so it’d save me a lot of time, actually,” he said. “Instead of me going out with four wheelers, walking out, checking ice, I could just send that out, and it would all be done!”
Omro would be one of just 13 high schools to be selected as an InvenTeam this year.
But the work doesn’t end there.
With the $10,000 awarded to them, the team now is tasked with creating a new, updated model.
“We wanted to do something so that someone can just easily take it somewhere, instead of this huge robot. We’re thinking more of a puck-size, maybe like a Roomba-sized,” Larsen said.
The Omro InvenTeam will spend the next nine months working on its ice safety “puck.”
“I would probably buy one of the first ones,” Herman said.
And may get a chance to present it to MIT in-person.
“I will be extremely nervous, but excited at the same time,” Larsen said.
“Inven-Teams” receives the funds to invent technological solutions to real-world problems.
The purpose of MIT’s program is to inspire a new generation of inventors.
