A team of Seattle high schoolers will compete against underwater robotics teams from around the world during the MATE ROV World Championships in Canada next month.
Triton Robotics is making its third straight trip to the international event in St. John’s, Newfoundland. The independent team is comprised of seven 11th graders who all attend Seattle Academy.
MATE (Marine Advanced Technology Education) ROV, which takes place June 25-27, challenges teams to complete underwater mission tasks drawn from real-world ocean science problems. This year’s tasks include mapping cold-water coral ecosystems, deploying ocean observatory instrumentation, modeling offshore wind turbines, and operating profiling floats beneath sea ice — a notoriously difficult environment for conventional monitoring equipment.
The 2026 competition is themed around two United Nations science initiatives focused on ocean sustainability and cryospheric research.
Triton is bringing two custom-built systems to the competition. Njord, a remotely operated vehicle, will handle the wave tank and flume tank challenges, navigating strong currents, low visibility, and precision manipulation tasks. Skadi, an autonomous vertical profiling float, will operate in the National Research Council’s ice tank, diving beneath sea ice that conventional ocean-monitoring floats can’t reach.
Triton also built TritonOS, custom onboard software that handles depth-hold stabilization and lets the pilot instantly flip Njord’s controls so the rear manipulator operates as intuitively as the front arm — something no commercial system could do. The team added specialized tools for the mission tasks, including computer vision for invasive crab identification, a photogrammetry pipeline for iceberg measurement, and pneumatic grippers calibrated using tomatoes until they could grasp delicate cold-water coral without crushing it.
“This season has been about iteration — testing, breaking things, understanding why they failed, and rebuilding them better,” said Tenzin Larkin, the team’s co-CEO.
Triton Robotics is fully student-led and unaffiliated with any school, according to a news release. Members oversee engineering design, software development, budgeting, testing, documentation, and pool operations; mentors provide workshop and safety oversight. The team completed approximately 30 deep-water pool tests this season with zero safety incidents.
Team members include Griffin Fisher, Tenzin Larkin, Thomas Gust, Simon Hajduk, Theo Lipson, Miles Lipson, and Emi Enoki.
“Our mission is to help the environment through engineering,” said Gust, the team’s other co-CEO.
Update: A Triton Tech team from Edmonds College north of Seattle will also compete in the same event. The team — which is raising funds — is competing for the third consecutive year, and is in the “Pioneer” class against colleges from around the globe. In its inaugural year, a last-minute team built an ROV from PVC pipe and placed fifth in its category. Last year, the team traveled to Michigan and finished ninth in the world.
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