Students Come Up With
Creative Ways to Score Goals In ‘Robotic Soccer Shootout’ Challenge
Goals were scored at a furious pace from many different angles by
ingenious machines designed and constructed by Rose-Hulman Institute of
Technology sophomore and junior electrical engineering and computer
engineering students in the college’s high-tech Robotic Soccer Shootout.
The event concluded a 10-week introductory Engineering Practice design
course, taught by professors Bruce Ferguson and David Voltmer.Teams
of students were challenged to design Lego-based robots that could shoot
a ping pong ball (representing a soccer ball) past five stationary
defenders and a goalie, which roamed randomly in front of the goal area,
within a four-minute period. Shots could be taken from five designated
areas on the playing field, with points awarded for each successful
shot, depending on its level of complexity (5-4-3-2-1 points).
Adding to the challenge was the fact that the goalie’s movements
could be disrupted for five second through an electronic jamming signal
sent from the students’ robot to the goalie’s master controller.
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| Creative Idea: One of the Lego-based
robots utilized a curved arm to get the ping pong balls around
the wooden defender pegs, providing a straight path toward the
goal. All but one of the robots scored a goal in the
competition. |
Thirteen of the 14 student teams scored at least one goal during the
competition, while eight teams managed to record 50 or more points. The
grand champions, The Grizzled Gentlemen team, totaled 152 points, with
38 four-point goals, from a robot that utilized a Friction Activated
Plow Deflector, a hammer-type device that shot the ping pong ball
through a curved robotic arm that extended around the stationary wooden
defender pegs, providing a straight path into the goal. The machine was
so effective that contest volunteers could hardly keep up retrieving a
ball after a successful shot before the robot was ready to take another
shot.
“We got the angle perfect that gave us a clear path to the goal,”
stated Jin Chen, a junior computer engineering and electrical
engineering double major. “We knew, if everything worked out, that we
could have a good shot at the championship. However, scoring 152 points
(in the finals) was fantastic.”
Teammate Ted Wojtysiak, a junior computer engineering student, added:
“We came up with a good idea early on in the planning process. Once we
found out it could work, we knew we were in business.”
Other members of the winning team were junior electrical engineering
students Philip Rendina and Daniel Shapiro. The team’s entry also
received the Designer’s Choice Award for most creative/elegant
successful solution, chosen by other students and contest judges.
The robots' performance in the competition did not impact a student's
grade in the course. The contest was designed to provide the students
with a simple means to follow design and problem solving principles in
engineering, according to Ferguson.
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| Proud Of Effort: Members of the Spammish
Soccer Moms team look satisfied with their robot as it scores
goals at a rapid pace. The entry finished second, scoring 112
points. |
The Spammish Soccer Moms, consisting of four male students, came up
with a rapid-fire scoring machine (112 points) after two and a half
design attempts and 175 lines of computer software code, according to
Eric Monhaut, a junior electrical engineering major. Other team members
were juniors Daniel Forbess, Curtis Rhodes, and Todd Taft. Rhodes, the
group’s only computer engineering major, wrote all of the computer
software for the project, while the other three members designed the
robotic scoring machine.
The team’s first design utilized a pool cue to shoot the ball into
the goal. However, that mechanism didn’t provide the consistency
required from team members. Then, a motorized device was designed that
shot the ball on a diagonal angle, through the defender pegs. That
process scored goals on three of every four shots. To improve the odds
even further, two Lego-based arms were extended to help guide the balls
on a straight path into the goal. In the competition, the team’s machine
missed only four shots and scored goals nearly every three to four
seconds.
"We were confident that we could score over 100 points (within the
four-minute time period) and be one of the top teams in the
competition,” Monhaut stated. “We may not have won, but we had a lot of
fun and learned a lot about teamwork and computer programming.”
Rhodes added: “This has been one of the best classes that I have had
at Rose-Hulman. Now, I can see where all of the courses are coming
together into creating an engineer that can solve problems.”
Other teams coming up with creative solutions included Team Napoleon
with Caleb Harper, Andrew Jobe, Omar Martin and David Mumaw, which
utilized a conveyor belt mechanism to pick up balls (scoring 85 points);
The Three Amigos team of Andrew Boice, Michael Goril and Raymond Wise,
which had a 100 percent success rate on shots (scoring 56 points); and
the Short-Handed Trio 8 team of Pamela Dopka, Micah Houtz and
Christopher Meyer, whose device hurled balls over the top of the
defenders and into the goal (55 points).
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