Sponge Wars: Attack of the Drones!
28th Annual Engineering Design Competition
Tuesday, March 12, 2013, 1:00-3:00pm, Brown Gym Basketball Court
The Mission
The fundamental challenge of engineering is solving problems while meeting basic constraints. The ME72 students were asked to form teams. Each team was tasked to design, build, and operate, under manual and/or autonomous control, a pair of vehicles that will:
- Retrieve dry kitchen sponges from a four-foot high platform,
- Place these sponges in goals their team controls,
- Navigate autonomously to place sponges in their autonomous goal.
- Maintain their own score while reducing the opposing team’s score by blocking and by having their vehicles contact buttons to switch goal control (and points) to their team.
The Challenge
The competition is divided into rounds. Each round consists of 4-minute heats among the remaining teams, where a heat consists of a head-to-head contest between two teams. During the heat’s first 5 seconds, teams may not interfere with each other, but after that they may engage in both offensive and defensive moves. The team with the most points at the end of the heat wins. After two losses, a team will be eliminated from the competition.
In the News
2013 Sponsors:
Photos by Bob Paz
| Team Name | Team Members |
|---|---|
| Fat Squirrels |
Juan Pablo Cardenas
|
| Der Red Penguins |
Deeksha Agrawal
Thomas Kwong Nandini Mukherjee Mary Nguyen Chris Zheng |
| Gym Rats |
Rachel Deghuee
Will Dooris Albie Lavin James Leet Nic Zhang |
|
Blacker Air and Machinery Force (BAMF)
[Winner] |
Puikei Cheng
Robb Morgan Jeff Odell Russell Smith Michael Williamson |
| Spongebot MetalPants |
Liana Braun
Garima Gupta Kristen Holtz Tiffany Huang Ahalya Prabhaker |
| How to Train Your Blimp |
Ethan Boronson
Rachel Hess Tim MacDonald Alex Wilson |