St. Cloud State University

SCSU won Robot Competition

This past Friday (April 28th), a group of engineering students (Andy Neddermeyer, Davian Richards, Wesley Herold, and Martín Rámero-Sanchez, advisors: Mark C. Petzold (ECE) and Warren Yu (MME)) participated in the General Dynamics Unattended Ground Vehicle competition at Hyland Lake Park in Bloomington. 

The St. Cloud State team competed against two teams from Minnesota State University, Mankato.  The goal of the competition was to demonstrate robots controlled and navigated through a wireless link, using only telemetry from the robot, including video, a global positioning system (GPS), and an electronic compass.  The robots job was to deploy and recover sensor pods at predefined locations.  All three teams experienced problems with their robots, and one of the Mankato teams couldn’t get their robot to work, after several key components failed that morning.  In the end, the St. Cloud State team was declared the winner, on the strength of their design, and the fact that their robot navigated the course with ease, despite the fact that they never got their GPS working.

Each of the Mankato teams consisted of 8 engineering students, and included computer science, electrical engineering, computer engineering, and mechanical engineering majors, both at the senior level and graduate students.  The St. Cloud State team consisted of 3 electrical engineering seniors and 1 mechanical engineering senior.  The fact that the St. Cloud State team was outnumbered 2 to 1 and still managed to develop a more complex but more elegant design is a testament to the hard work of our students and our excellent engineering programs.  Our students performed well together, and overcame many obstacles along the way, including the crash of the hard drive containing the mechanical design over the holiday break.  Our design used a single microcontroller to control the data modem, GPS, electronic compass, the deploy and retrieval mechanism, internal temperature, monitor battery voltage, and control the drive, while the Mankato teams either used a single board computer running Linux, or several microcontrollers.  Our engineers were able to implement some innovative programming to stretch the single microcontroller to its limits.  The mechanical design was elegant, compact, and functional.  It was designed by a single mechanical engineer, and implemented with the help of the electrical engineering team.  The St. Cloud State team was also the only team to design and implement a graphical user interface for their robot, indicating robot position and direction, and display the operating parameters of the robot.  Everyone was impressed with the St. Cloud State design, including the Mankato teams.

We are proud of the way the team worked together, and the ultimate design they developed.  The ease with which they implemented their ideas was amazing, considering that much of what they needed to do either isn’t directly covered in their coursework, or not offered until the senior year.  These students are very talented engineers, and deserve the honor.