Design Competition Pits Ball-Shooting Robots In Head-To-Head Contest
May 9, 2008
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It takes undergraduate teams months of work, weeks of reading, and endless hours of trial and error. But at stake is thousands of dollars in prizes and the glory of knowing they created what not so long ago took years of innovation - an autonomous robot capable of picking up balls and shooting them into an opponent’s goal.
Fifteen teams will compete at the McCormick School of Engineering’s 17th annual Design Competition, which begins at 12:30 p.m. on Saturday, May 17. Held in the Ford Motor Engineering Design Center at Northwestern University, the competition is no ordinary robot show – it draws crowds of onlookers who cheer and gasp at the robots’ success and failures.
Last year, robots had to capture a flag in the middle of the course, transport it to the target area and place and release the flag. Watch a video about it here:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVqS3TVIDTo
But this year, teams’ robots – which can’t be larger than a 12-inch cube – must try to pick up six balls and shoot the balls across into one of the opponent robot’s three goals on the opposite side of an eight-by-eight foot arena.
Points will be awarded according to which goal the balls make it in. Getting a ball in the middle goal, which is six inches wide, earns a team seven points, while getting a ball into either of the two side goals, both a foot wide, earns a team three points. Any balls that make it onto the opponent’s side but not into a goal will receive one point, but no parts of the robots are allowed to cross over to the opponent’s side of the arena at any time. Teams will compete head-to-head in two-minute rounds during the double-elimination competition.
Teams made up of undergraduate engineering students across McCormick began working on their robots back in November, designing and programming using microprocessors and sensors that enable the robots to perform the assigned task on their own (remote control is not allowed.) Each team had to pass three milestone tests along the way to prove their robot could actually find the balls and shoot them across the arena in order to qualify for the competition.
Cash prizes will be awarded around 4 p.m. to the top three teams: $4,000 for first place, $2,000 for second and $1,000 for third. The Myke Minbiole Elegant Engineering Award, named for a McCormick alumnus who worked at Northrop Grumman and who won the competition in 2001, will also be awarded. Minbiole was killed in a hit-and-run collision in 2007, and the $500 award is a tribute to his approach of technically elegant engineering.
Industry sponsors include DMC, General Motors, Northrop Grumman, Deloitte, Federal Mogul.
For more information, visit dc2008.info.googlepages.com/home
