First year engineers shine at 20th annual robotics competition

First year engineering honors students put their sweet skills to the test at The Ohio State University College of Engineering’s 20th annual robotics competition on April 5.

The French Field House was transformed into a high-tech candy land as 74 teams set their robots in motion on the 12-by 12-foot courses stimulating a candy store. The fully autonomous robots had just two minutes to perform specific tasks, including adjusting the temperature of a candy making oven, activating a candy making and packaging line, transporting a skid of packaged chocolate to a cooler and delivering a scoop to the store’s candy counter. The robots were limited in size to a 9 inch square footprint and constructed of various materials, including sheet metal, PVC, acrylic, plywood and Erector set components.

“Students have been together for nine to ten weeks designing and building small, autonomous vehicles which are serving as a task robot in a candy factory,” said Rick Freuler, director of the Fundamentals of Engineering for Honors program at Ohio State. “They’ve been learning engineering problem solving, programming, CAD fundamentals and team work.”

Teams were scored on design and how well their robots performed in individual and head-to-head runs. The team that placed first overall included engineering students Alexander Fuhr, Victoria Hicks, Jennifer Luthman and Lena Ta. 

“We learned how to program and build a robot, but the most important skill I learned, the one thing that everyone learns through any design project, is how to break down such a huge task into smaller, more manageable pieces,” Luthman said. “By breaking it up into performance tests each week—focusing on one small task at a time—it wasn't quite as scary as I had first imagined.”

The candy store scenario, from conceptualization to decoration, as well as all of the technology involved was created by the First-Year Engineering Honors Program’s undergraduate teaching assistants, who are also current Buckeye engineering students.

Each member of the overall winning team was awarded a $250 scholarship sponsored by Proctor & Gamble. Other corporate sponsors for the event included Alcatel-Lucent, Alcoa, Arcelor Mittal, ExxonMobil, GE Aviation, Georgia-Pacific, Honda, MindWare Technologies, National Instruments, Nestle, OxONet, Raytheon and Shell.

Other team competition awards
Second place overall: Heather Clarson, Nathan Power, Frederic Ouimet, Michael Schulz
Third place overall: Jeffrey Ivey, Aaron Maharry, Daniel Sobchuk, Luke Stegman
Fourth place overall: Angela Dennison, Brian Schubert, Kory Sherman, Benjamin Stocker

Best engineered
First place: David Hayes, Carter Hurd, Ryan Niemocienski, Hopen Kaichi Yang
Second place: Angela Dennison, Brian Schubert, Kory Sherman, Benjamin Stocker
Third place: Ben Brannan, Erin Donnelly, Nick Gulish, Sam Hubert

Most innovative
First place: Nathan Bratcher, Nathan Melzar, Nathan Lamba, Nathaniel Lang
Second place: Nicole Brown, Andrew Eberly, Kalyn Sigg, Sean Thompson
Third place: David Hayes, Carter Hurd, Ryan Niemocienski, Hopen Kaichi Yang

Most consistent
First place: Nathan Bratcher, Nathan Melzar, Nathan Lamba, Nathaniel Lang
Second place: Dan Arters, Mitchel Lockwood, Michael Mackay, Michael Nock
Third place: Angela Dennison, Brian Schubert, Kory Sherman, Benjamin Stocker

Sweetest robot
First place: Thomas Barrett, Tyler Hagan, Kelly Semple, Jennifer Surface
Second place: William Deitrick, Griffin Jenkins, Danielle Lynd, Nicholas Singstock

View more photos from the competition online.