Engineering Students Culminate Year With Robot, Roller Coaster Competitions
Heated competition for freshman engineering students came to a close yesterday amid twists, turns and spills.
Members of the Acronamiacs team celebrate their win in this year's robot competition. The first-year engineering students are, from left in pink shirts, Beth Johnson, Saitu Parihar, Aaron Shetler and Michael Moyer. The members created their team name by combining "acroname," the type of motor used in their robot, and "Anamaniacs," a television show. (Photo by Jo McCulty, University Photo Services)
The studies of first-year students from Ohio State’s College of Engineering concluded with roller coaster and robot competitions.
Teams of honors students entered robots they designed and built in a competition to simulate a chemical spill cleanup in courses set up at St. John Arena. The students set their robots in motion around specially-built, 12- by 12-foot courses with instructions to navigate the chemical manufacturing facility, determine whether the chemical being used in the plant is an acid or a base, determine the location of a spill, disable the pumps causing the leak and clean the spilled material from the plant floor, all within a 2-minute time limit.
The 2006 champions of the robot competition were team members Elizabeth Johnson, Michael Moyer, Abhishruti Parihar and Aaron Shetler, who bested 48 other teams to take the title.
Other winning teams in the overall competition were second place, Steve Bryan, Andrew Dulmage, Ryan Folsom and Craig Poeppelman; and third place, Brett Kizer, Vienny Nguyen, Igor Sirotin and Matthew Suguitan. The fourth-place winners, Daniel Crush, Brandon Ervin, Ryan Hartlage and Michael Lauzau, also received the prize for best-engineered robot. In that portion of the competition, the second-place winners were Jon Dufour, Gabe Hierholzer, Chris Hoying and Mike Vick, and third place went to David Bell, Andrew Ferguson, Ryan Schmid and Ryan Torres.
Most Innovative Award team members were John Kruckenberg, Frank Luther, Eric Proehl and Jason Pyles, who built a two-part robot. It had a base unit that handled tasks in the chemical plant’s “control room” and communicated with a roving unit, which was attached to the base unit with a retractable wire tether system and obtained the pH sample, activated the spill shut off switch and cleaned up the spill.
Corporate sponsors who provided judges for the robot competition were Honda, P&G, Shell, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, DaimlerChrysler, Autodesk and Lucent. Other sponsors for the competition were National Instruments, Eaton and Microsoft.
First-place honors in the First-Year Engineering Program roller coaster competition went to Team "Fat Man Sprint" (notice the Simpsons-and-donut theme). The members, from left, are Eric Emmons, John Cornwell, Tony Morgan and David Evans.
Other freshman students participated in the roller coaster competition, which required them to design and build a model roller coaster using PVC pipe and flexible tubing complete with a circuit board. They measure and control velocity to land the “car,” actually a large plastic marble, safely in a small box at the end of the roller coaster “ride.”
After a preliminary and final round among the approximately 70 teams, nine were judged in the final competition by faculty members and Jeff Gramke, chief engineer at Kings Island amusement park. The first-place winners were John Cornwell, Eric Emmons, David Evans and Tony Morgan. Second place went to Chris Hnat, Jeff Hunter, Anjay Sampat and Jared White, while the third-place team, which was from the Newark campus, consisted of Darin Collins, Nick Cunningham, Justin Gardner, Kevin Gordon and Andrew Pence.
The competitions highlight the college’s First-Year Engineering program, which combines lectures, projects and labs. Along the way, the students learn team-building, project management and communication skills through oral presentations and research exercises; find out about all the college has to offer, such as participation in student-led projects like the Buckeye Bullet; and have interaction with senior faculty members and industry representatives. The program is part of a nationwide engineering education reform initiative originally funded by the National Science Foundation.
For more information about the First-Year Engineering Program, visit http://engineering.osu.edu/fe/index.php. For details on the Fundamentals of Engineering for Honors program, go to http://feh.eng.ohio-state.edu/.
Contact: Joan Slattery Wall, (614) 292-4064, wall.107@osu.edu, or Dr. John Merrill, program director, First-Year Engineering Program, (614) 292-0650 or merrill.25@osu.edu.
