Part science fair, part meeting to determine future research at the Army’s Engineer Research and Development Center, the conference this week at ERDC is so big they had to include super in the title.

The Super RARG, which stands for Research Area Review Group, brought together people from throughout the country to see displays of ongoing projects at ERDC as well as determine new projects that researchers will be undertaking this year as part of the civil works program at the research center.

“We call it the Super RARG, because we have three different business lines —navigation, flood risk management and environmental,” said Mary Cialone, the associate technical director for Flood Risk management. “This particular year is the first time we are having all three of those business lines meet together and our goal is to look at the statements of need from our district offices to determine what research we should be performing in the coming fiscal year.”

More than 150 people from each of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineer’s district offices throughout the contiguous United States as well as Alaska and Hawaii participated in the conference. The conference allows representative from the districts to meet with researchers at ERDC and plan the projects for the upcoming year to meet the needs of the districts.

Researchers also displayed their ongoing projects to show what they are currently working on and the capabilities of their existing technology.

“When they see something we did last year they may say, ‘that’s really neat can you do this also or enhance it to have another feature to help my district,’” Cialone said. “They see what we have the capabilities to do and they might build upon that.”

All of the projects being discussed and planned are a part of ERDC’s civil works mission, which includes working on the nation’s infrastructure.

One of the projects on display was a robot that can be used to check for corrosion and other issues on steel structures such as lock doors. The goal is to create better results while using a cheaper method of detection.

“The device climbs vertical steel walls and it performs an inspection of that wall itself. It is looking for the integrity of the steel,” said James Tallent, a senior research engineer. “Currently, we use very expensive and inaccurate methods to assess the integrity of the structure and that is using divers in murky water or dewatering a huge body of water to look at what is below the water.”

Researchers also displayed a new watercraft known as MARV that enables civilian and military personnel to test piers and other structures for issues before using them to deploy aide or for military missions.

The new craft enables teams to do in only a matter of hours what it used to take divers weeks to finish.

“They used to send out a 15 to 20 man dive team and they’d go out there and dive on it for two or three weeks and touch everything,” Thad Pratt, a research physicist and branch chief, said. “Our mission was to do that in nine days. We had to assess, determine a repair plan, ship the plan and repair it to bring it up to operation in nine days.”

The conference will conclude Friday.