Salt Lake City
The ASEE 2018 national competition was held in Salt Lake City Utah this year. The theme was designed around Utah being the beehive state. The goal was to build an autonomous robot which would collect orange and white ping pong balls in a honeycomb pattern which was representative of pollen and honey in a hive. The teams each get four trial runs in which all of the objectives have to be completed within a 120 second time frame. Lastly, the robot or robots (though we had no multiple robot solutions this year), had a size constraint of 10″x10″x12″ for all robots combined during a trial run.
Disclaimer
Unfortunately, as usual, I did not get to spend much time taking photos and videos as I was in charge of keeping score. As I’ve also mentioned before, I don’t prohibit students from standing in front of the camera. It can be nerve racking to stand in front of an audience as your robot does whatever its going to do. You hope it does what you programmed it to do but it’s a completely different environment so lots of things can go wrong. All of that to say, a lot of the videos this year have people standing in front of them. Usually I cut those videos out but since I have so few without obstruction I’m just posting all of the videos I have as they are.
Competition Photos
Competition Videos
Use the playlist menu (upper right) to view the list of videos.
Results and Conclusion
The biggest hurdle I saw with this competition was the navigation. There were some pretty impressive solutions that maintained very good accuracy even without using the lines which is difficult to do. Most of the bots that had a sorting mechanism did very well if not flawless at sorting the balls. Here are the final results
