Student-designed Robots Put to the Test

Student-designed Robots Put to the Test
BY DAVID KAPLAN
Rice News Staff
Jan. 21, 1999

On a Sunday afternoon at the end of the fall semester, Anne and Charles Duncan Hall’s McMurtry Auditorium seems more like Autry Court. It’s standing room only and there’s a big-game buzz in the air.

The crowd is cheering on ELEC 201 students who are taking their final exam. More thrilling than most finals, it’s a contest that pits robot against robot. Each autonomous robot has been created by a team of three students.

Their teacher, John Bennett, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, created the 5-year-old ELEC 201, Introduction to Engineering Design, or “LEGO Robots,” course to demonstrate that engineering is “a creative process and a lot of fun.” Bennett also believes that learning is enhanced when “the learner is building something real in the real world.”

The course’s other instructor, Jim Young, professor of electrical and computer engineering, notes that 40 percent of the students in the class are nonscience majors. The course has no prerequisites. Young says that many of the students entered the fall ’98 course with very little technical knowledge, yet all 36 robots in the class qualified for competition.

A student’s grade is not determined by where his or her team’s robot will place in the contest. Final rankings are more about bragging rights.

In “Capture the Robo-Flag,” the one-on-one, double-elimination tournament chosen for the final exam, a robot earns points by entering the other robot’s side of a game board, picking up the opposing robot’s foam blocks, returning “home” with the blocks, and placing the blocks in a designated holding area.

The robots sport a variety of innovative features, such as pop-out appendages, claws and nets. Bennett has found over the years that “simple and reliable sometimes beats complex and clever.”

Judy Le, a Sid Richardson College junior and a member of the robot team “je ne sais quoi,” describes the contest as “exciting and nerve-wracking. So many things can go wrong!”

Le’s teammate, Sid Richardson College sophomore Esther Sung, remembers the early days of the course, when they received their robot supplies: a bucketful of LEGO building blocks, motors and sensors, gears, wheels, and a printed circuit computer board.

Turning that bucket of stuff into a robot seemed daunting, Sung says. “We took our robot apart three times.” Eventually, “je ne sais quoi” was ready for battle. “That sense of achievement is one of the best things about the course,” she says.

In the process of building a robot, Sung and her classmates acquired some basic skills in computer use and programming, electronic assembly and problem solving. Designing a winning robot requires strategy, imagination, common sense and devotion, she says.

Sung, who is undecided on her major, now has a greater appreciation for engineers and “what they go through.”