🇨🇦 Evan Budz

Evan Budz grew up hiking, canoeing and spending time outdoors around Burlington, Ontario, on the western tip of Lake Ontario. The idea behind his project came from a principle he attributes to his parents. 'My parents brought me up with the sort of principle that every place that I visit, I should leave it a bit better than I found it,' he told Popular Science in May 2026. He had been actively looking for a way to act on it when, on a camping trip, he watched a snapping turtle swim past.

'When I saw the snapping turtle, it was so graceful, fluidic, and generally non-disruptive' to its surroundings, he said. 'I thought it'd be really interesting to go and try and replicate its natural swimming kinematics' in a robot. That instinct turned out to be a serious engineering thesis. As he put it: 'Most current underwater technologies can produce things like noise from their propellers or very high-pressure water streams,' which can erode environments. His conclusion was blunt — 'I don't want to harm the various places that I'm hoping to protect.'

The build began with study rather than soldering. Budz watched footage of sea turtles swimming and spoke with specialists at his local aquarium, learning that turtles use their large front flippers for propulsion and their smaller rear limbs for steering and stability. He modelled a prototype in SolidWorks, the professional 3D computer-aided design package, then fabricated the parts himself. The result — which he calls BURT, for Bionic Underwater Robotic Turtle — has four flippers in that same configuration, a main acrylic tube housing the electronics, and a Raspberry Pi microcomputer running the onboard AI models.

The specifications are those of a working instrument, not a demonstration piece. BURT weighs roughly eleven pounds, much of it deliberately added metal so the robot can overcome buoyancy and hold depth. 'To achieve neutral buoyancy in the water,' Budz explained, 'I needed the turtle to basically be heavier than the force of buoyancy that's pushing it up.' It carries a GPS module for position tracking, a forward-facing camera, depth and hazard sensors, and lights and an ultrasonic transducer for murky water. It runs eight hours on a lithium battery, extended by a solar panel, and cruises at about half a mile per hour — a real turtle's pace, adjustable by changing the flipper oscillation frequency.

Most of the testing happened in his grandparents' backyard pool, which is a little over eight feet deep. 'I basically went out and created a simulated coral reef setup using 3D models,' he said, programming the robot to recognise what coral bleaching and invasive species look like, 'and the turtle then swims around them to simulate what it would do in a real-world environment.' Against that setup, BURT detected replicated coral bleaching with 96 percent accuracy. It follows a predetermined search grid autonomously, with no tether of the kind conventional underwater drones require. He has also tested it in Lake Ontario itself.

The awards started before ISEF. BURT took first prize at the European Union Contest for Young Scientists, held in Latvia in 2025, and won recognition through the Canada-Wide Science Fair, whose finalists emerge from a national network of roughly 25,000 competitors. Then, for the 2026 season, Budz added an entirely new capability: a holographic imaging device that records the structural characteristics and shapes of tiny particles suspended in water, feeding a custom-trained neural network that classifies each particle as a microplastic or not — down to 100 microns.

That upgrade is what won Phoenix. At the 76th Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair in May 2026 — more than 1,700 finalists, over $7 million in awards — Evan Budz received the $50,000 Gordon E. Moore Award for Positive Outcomes for Future Generations, ISEF's award for the project judged most likely to improve life on a large scale. He was also named Category Winner in Environmental Engineering and collected two Special Awards, part of a fifteen-award haul for Youth Science Canada's Team Canada.

His stated ambition is fleets. 'I've already looked at coral bleaching, invasive species, and microplastics,' he said, 'but there are so many different places where this can be used.' The immediate engineering questions are depth rating and turbidity — how deep BURT can safely go, and how well the imaging holds up in genuinely murky water. Both are ordinary problems in marine robotics, which is the point: what began as a teenager's observation on a camping trip has become an instrument with the same open questions as any professional survey platform.