Student-designed robots go head-to-head in Engineering competition

Monday night, 19 teams of Engineering students will attempt to take their skills outside the classroom and onto the hockey rink.

Fifty-seven student-designed robots will go head-to-head in a competition that marks the culmination of a seven-project course.

Hosted by the School of Engineering and Applied Science’s “Design of Mechatronic Systems” course, the event will take place from 6 to 9 p.m. in the Wu and Chen Auditorium in Levine Hall.

“[The course] is the fusion of mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and computer science,” said Engineering professor Jonathan Fiene, who organized the competition.

“We think of [these three topics] separately, but a lot of systems in our world today are completely linked,” he added. “The project is an opportunity to tie the topics all together.”

For the competition, students had a variety of tasks — design the structure of their robots, manufacture the circuitry for the driving motors and write the computer code to control the robots’ motion on the makeshift hockey rink.

The robots are all battery-powered and must be able to function on their own without a remote controller.

To navigate the rink and attempt to score goals with a small puck, the robots use Nintendo Wii sensors to detect four lights shining above the rink. The robots move through the rink by calculating the distance between the four lights in relation to their current position.

Throughout the design and construction process, many students said they ran into a unique set of challenges because they had little experience integrating the different engineering systems required.

“There are lots of frustrations, but you get to see the robots play hockey on their own,” Engineering senior Sydney Jackopin said. “Even though I understand how the systems work, it still blows my mind seeing hunks of metal and plastic running around.”

While Jackopin’s team won all three of its games in the preliminary rounds last week, they realized that the goal-scoring robots on their team often fought each other for control of the puck.

To correct the mistake, the team wrote new computer code. When they went to compete in later rounds, the new code interfered with the robots’ performance and kept the robots out of play for an entire half of a round.

“It’s been a rough day, but we’re going to fix it for Monday, and I think we’ll be okay,” Jackopin said.

Monday’s event will mark the third-ever competition in the course’s history. Participation has increased steadily over the years — from 30 students three years ago to 82 this year.

“One of the interesting things about the course is how far we get in one semester. We started from really basic concepts in circuits and programming,” first-year Mechanical Engineering doctoral student Jimmy Paulos said. “The robots competing on Monday are more complex than we would have thought.”

Fiene added that “every student at Penn is competitive. The competition kind of taps into that. Even if the robots don’t do well in a particular match, the competition is really just a way to show what they can do.”

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.