PEP Team

PEP (Promoting Electric Propulsion) is an organized competition sponsored by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and the American Society of Naval Engineers (ASNE) in which more than 200 students compete to create small-scale, remote-control boats which utilize electric propulsion. As of 2024, 35 universities (including URI) actively compete in this engineering competition, which takes place on Broad Bay in Virginia Beach.

This competition provides students with valuable learning experiences and insight with respect to engineering a boat from the ground up – leading to an increasingly robust future workforce for the US Navy and Marines.

Sam Miller, an engineering student at URI, helped elaborate some of the unique opportunities and challenges that members of our PEP team are exposed to – members get technical experience such as practice with system integration, manufacturing processes, and blueprint creation, but also hands-on skills including the physical construction of the boat’s hull, along with some engineering problem solving (fixing leaks and defective parts, targeting underperformance). Getting involved with the URI PEP team also looks great on a resume, especially in the case of any Navy related work.

Below are resources provided by Alexei Sondergeld, a member of URI’s PEP team. They showcase two boats made for the PEP competition – Meteor, URI’s competing craft in PEP24, and Naruto Uzumaki, the URI PEP team’s most recent development.

For more information, please visit:

• https://www.navalengineers.org/uri
• https://www.navalengineers.org/pep24

You can also reach out to Sam Miller directly via:

• Email: smill22127@uri.edu