High school students invent new navigation method

ANKARA

Two high school students have become the winners of a competition held by The Scientific and Technical Research Council of Türkiye (TÜBİTAK) with their ultrasonic navigation project which can locate objects without GPS, the satellite-based radio navigation system.

Halil İbrahim Yenitürk and Tuna Özer, two junior high school students from the capital Ankara developed a system called “Ultrasonic Navigation.”

As the system is in operation, the sound waves emitted by ultrasonic sensors hit the object and come back, and the object’s location is found by calculating the time in between.

“The model is the result of about six months of work. We received great support from the school administration throughout this process. In fact, we realized that our device can also be used in submarines, high-speed unmanned aerial vehicles and rockets,” Özer told local media.

Even though there are similar devices in this field on the market, these devices’ error rates are higher than the model they developed, Yenitürk said.

Yenitürk and Özer's project ranked first in the country in the physics branch at the TÜBİTAK’s annual competition where high school students’ research projects are evaluated.

The students will apply for a patent to the Turkish Patent Institute within this month and plan to represent the nation in the European Union Contest for Young Scientists (EUCYS) to be held in Brussels, Belgium between Sept. 13 and 17.

The students told local media that the idea for the project sparked when they lost the school's drone, which they were flying in a forested area near the school last year. The drone could not be located with GPS.

When they lost the drone, the students worked on developing their system to find objects’ locations without GPS.

Physics teacher Halit Koca, who is the advisor of the project, stated that the students worked tirelessly during the challenging process of developing the system.