As part of its continued support of the university-industry cooperation and those who are enthusiastic at translating applied science into hands-on products, Alltek Marine Electronics Corp, today announced an official sponsorship with the UBC SailBot Team in 2020 and 2021.

UBC SailBot, an engineering design team based at The University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC, Canada, is specialize in building small and medium-sized autonomous vessels, handling everything from design and construction, to system integration and testing. Their latest project Raye brings together some of the top students across the UBC to contributing to innovations in the field of marine engineering.

“On behalf of the team, I wish to thank Alltek Marine for your help and support! Especially in a time of COVID-19, we appreciate all the support that we can get to make Raye possible.

We at UBC Sailbot wish to thank you all for your continued support of our team! This year has been hard on everyone in unique ways, but what holds us all together is a common objective of adapting to changing conditions. This pandemic has highlighted the importance of being grateful for what we still have to enrich our engineering education, and we wish to share our appreciation for your amazing help.” said Simon Wu, the Electrical Team Lead of UBC SailBot.

“We are excited to partner with UBC SailBot to further support the young academics who strive to challenge engineering boundaries by designing reliable autonomous sailboats. This partnership is also a great opportunity to showcase the superior performance and reliability of our AIS transceiver in the most rigorous marine environment,” said Y. Y. Chiou, VP Sales and Marketing of Alltek Marine.

Despite the COVID-19 constraint, UBC SailBot is committed to launching Raye for her trip to Maui in Summer 2021, a 2300 nautical mile long yacht race that runs every two years with participants sailing from Victoria, BC to Maui, Hawaii. Raye will be the first fully autonomous vessel to ever participate in this event.