Winning ways: Buckeye engineering students earn top marks in competitions
Eight teams of Ohio State engineering students earned awards in diverse international and national competitions in 2022. Their impressive achievements included bringing home gold in a national agriculture design contest, and earning third place and a $50,000 prize—the best finish of any U.S. participant—in Amazon’s global challenge to advance conversational artificial intelligence.
“These fantastic accomplishments illustrate the passion and prowess Buckeye engineering students have for solving problems,” said David Tomasko, associate dean for academic programs and student services. “From competitions and project teams to outreach efforts and internships—our students have numerous opportunities to hone their engineering skills outside the classroom. We’re proud of their willingness to take on and excel at difficult challenges, and of their dedicated faculty mentors.”
A team of four senior food, agricultural and biological engineering majors brought home the gold in the national 2022 AGCO National Student Design Competition, which focuses on the design of engineering projects advancing agriculture. The team’s winning capstone project centered on transpiration control as an important component in growing fresh food for future deep space travel.
Ten graduate students advised by Computer Science and Engineering Associate Professor Huan Sun earned third place in the inaugural Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge, Amazon’s global university competition to advance conversational artificial intelligence. The challenge tasked 10 university teams to develop bots that could help customers complete cooking or do-it-yourself home improvement tasks that required multiple steps and decisions—and adapt those instructions based on the resources and tools available to the customer.
Also earning top honors was the 18-member Buckeye Vertical team, which soared to first place and earned $2,000 in prize money in the Vertical Flight Society’s national Design-Build-Vertical Fly collegiate competition. The competition enables students to design, build and ultimately fly vehicles representative of the state-of-the-art in the urban/advanced air mobility space. For the third year in a row, a multidisciplinary team of Ohio State students earned a gold medal at the annual iGEM (International Genetically Engineered Machine) Giant Jamboree with their engineered phage therapy to combat sepsis. And a team of four undergraduate materials science and engineering students advised by Associate Professor of Practice Elvin Beach won the 2022 ASM Heat Treating Society Strong Bar Competition that challenged participants to heat treat a steel bar to achieve the highest combination of bending strength and bend deflection.
The Ohio State University EcoCAR team placed second overall in the EcoCAR Mobility Challenge’s final year and earned several first-place awards for exceptional technical work. Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, General Motors and MathWorks, the four-year competition tasked 11 universities with reengineering a 2019 Chevrolet Blazer by utilizing electrification, advanced propulsion systems and automated vehicle technology. Mobility-minded students also cruised to second place in the SAE AutoDrive Challenge II. Sponsored by SAE International and General Motors, the four-year competition challenges nine universities to develop and demonstrate an autonomous vehicle (AV) that can navigate urban driving courses.
Six high-flying aerospace engineering students placed second in NASA's Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate’s (ARMD) 2022 Gateways to Blue Skies: Airports of Tomorrow Competition with their airport design concept, Project ECOAir.
Buckeye engineers are gearing up to take on more challenges in 2023, including a group of computer science and engineering students who will compete in the Alexa Prize SimBot Challenge. Teams will develop next-generation virtual assistants for completing real-world tasks by continuously learning and gaining commonsense reasoning ability. The SimBot finals will be scheduled between January 30 and March 27, 2023.
