ASEE TYESA State Competition 2017

The host of the competition rotates among a number of colleges each year. This year the New York TYESA State Competition 2017 was held at Monroe Community College on May 8th. For reasons currently unknown, unfortunately there were only two schools attending the competition. However, as always the competition was a success and teams had a good time immersing themselves in the competition and embracing the competitive nature of the event. A special thank you to the Borough of Manhattan Community College for coming all the way to Rochester to compete. Borough of Manhattan Community College hosted the state competition last year, it’s great to see repeat competitors.

The Objective

I’ve already written an article in more detail on the objective so I’ll simply highlight the important bits. The basic premise is that a fully autonomous robot will mimic the travels of Christopher Columbus, they will visit an island, pick up and drop off a dowel which represents a barrel of goods. The dowels that are picked up at each island must be brought back to Spain and all of this must be done while avoiding or managing a few obstacles.

At the start, six dowels will be on the robot ready for dispensing. As each island is visited, when a dowel is dispensed the team is awarded five points. If a dowel is also picked up the team will not receive any points until that dowel is delivered to Spain but once delivered in Spain the team will receive five points for each dowel. If you have been keeping track that is a total of 60 points achievable from dowel transportation. The obstacles the robots must face are four boulders represented by 2″ diameter dowels, for each boulder that is moved the team will receive a five point deduction for a maximum of a twenty point deduction. The other two obstacles to manage are rapids and a hurricane represented by patterns created out of black electrical tape.

Finally, there is a ninety second time limit to complete all of the tasks, once time is up, the team only receives credit for the points received up to that point. If all dowels are dispensed in their appropriate locations and no boulders are moved the teams are eligible for a time bonus equal to ninety seconds minus the time they took to complete the tasks flawlessly.

Trial 1

Unfortunately one of the teams (Flatline – April) had burned up their microcontroller so they had to pass on this trial but were working tirelessly to adapt to a new microcontroller. Megabus had some troubles that they later attributed to people standing too close to the track, teams are allowed to ask the audience to stand back, not to take flash photography, remain quiet or a number of other things if it will improve their robot’s functionality. Hereforpizza had a great run with five dowels collected and delivered in Spain, one got hung up because the robot was too far from the island. Hereforpizza chose not to deliver the dowels to the islands.

Trial 2

In trial two, the team with a burned up microcontroller had to pass again but kudos to them for not giving up, they were still working. We will see BAIL get their first perfect run and the only perfect run so far, congratulations to them. Hereforpizza had another successful delivery of six dowels that they collected from each island.

Trial 3

In trial three we’ll see team Flatline – April attempt to (without practice runs) run the track with their newly converted microcontroller. I have to applaud them simply for not giving up but in addition, they were able to completely rewire their robot from what was using an Arduino Mega to now use a Teensy which are not form factor compatible so it takes quite a bit of work to do this. Unfortunately, there just wasn’t an ability to test the robot so it was a shot in the dark as to whether it would work. Hereforpizza experienced a minor issue, only delivering five dowels to Spain as one got stuck on the top of the wall. In order to be considered delivered, the dowel must be, in some way, touching the bottom of the island.

Trial 4

In trial four we see BAIL get yet another perfect run, again the only team to have a perfect run and now two which gave them an unbeatable buffer of points to clinch the victory for Monroe Community College. Unfortunately Hereforpizza experienced a software glitch as, in the heat of the moment, they had apparently pulled their microcontroller off of the USB connection while it was still uploading. When the timer has started, so long as a robot has not moved, teams are allowed to continue to work on it until it moves. Once it starts moving, teams cannot touch their robot or the trial will end immediately.

Summary and Scoring

Hereforpizza would have placed second in this competition however they had some electrical failures on the day of the qualifiers. They were unable to qualify but wished to compete anyway so they did so with no score and this is why you will see a score of zero for them. BAIL took the lead with a whopping 179.33 points putting them 100 points away from the nearest competitor due to their ability to perform perfect runs. Second place went to La Santa Machina due to their ability to fairly consistently deliver blue dowels. Megabus came in third again as they were able to fairly consistently deliver blue dowels never even needing to rely on points from red dowels.

Yet again, it comes down to consistency, the more repeatable to and consistent your robot is, chances are you will be in the top three. Focus on the simplest task and do that consistently and you will most likely do well. In this case, the simplest task is to deliver the dowels to each island, provided you could deliver at least five dowels you would have placed in the top three.

More photos can be found on the Monroe Community College Engineering Facebook page