"At least 'Aub-E' sounds right"
This past weekend, IEEE held their Southeast 2009 Conference - Hardware Competition in Atlanta, GA and was hosted by GA Tech. We, Auburn University SPaRC (Student Projects and Research Committee), attended with our robot named "Aub-E" after our mascot "Aubie the Tiger" and rolled away collecting the first place trophy. It has been a while, for me at least, since I have competed in a robotics event and it sure feels good to be immersed in the environment once again.
The task of this year's IEEE Hardware Competition was to autonomously navigate a designated playing field collecting and sorting scattered debris that consisted of glass bottles, plastic bottles and aluminum cans within a four minute time frame. There were over forty teams competing from universities and states that included Florida, Alabama, UAB, Tennessee, Clemson, VMI, and many others. Our final score was 331, with the next closest being 265 of The University of Tennessee - Knoxville. The competition was indeed tough, but one primary advantage that I think we had over other teams was that our roster of student engineers was diverse and consisted of electrical, software, computer, and mechanical engineers (the event is primarily targeted towards electrical engineers).
The team went into preparing for this competition back in September '08 with the drive to win in hopes to shed some light on the SPaRC program and attract more recruits.
Video of rounds 1 and 2.
Video of rounds 3 and 4 as well as the awards banquet.
