TERRE HAUTE, Ind. (WTWO/WAWV) — Students at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology participated in an Olympic-style competition using robots.
Over 90 students at Rose-Hulman competed against one another in the RobOlympic Pentathlon event. Associate professor Dr. Deborah Walter says it is the culmination of nine weeks of working in teams to create and program remote-controlled robots that can compete in pentathlon events.
“We have a hurdles event, we have a shot-put-like event, which is very interesting,” Walter said. “The robot has to grab a golf ball, spin three times, and then release that golf ball, and their score, or how they win the event, is if they have the longest distance from the start.”
The event is part of the fall quarter’s Engineering Practice course. Student Anelys Caminero-Santiago says that a lot has gone into preparing their group’s robot for the event, and the process provided learning moments.
“Sometimes mistakes aren’t really, sometimes there’s things that aren’t in your hands,” Caminero-Santiago said. “Usually, I’m used to like, oh I can fix it with programming, but sometimes there’s other things that really don’t have to do with me or what I’m doing, and working with other people has also helped me realize that. We bounce off each other, and they point out stuff that I might not have noticed, so yeah.”
Another student, Carson Brown, says he hopes to be a CPU Architect one day. he says that this event teaches many of the same fundamentals that will be used in several engineering professions. The concept is getting something from Point A to Point B.
“First you’re going to write out your plan for your code,” Brown said. “That might be taking zeros and ones and putting that onto the CPU. That might be taking actual words, compiling that into zeros and ones, putting that onto the CPU, you still need that planning and engineering process and this has been a wonderful way to practice it.”
The challenge has been part of Rose-Hulman for over 20 years. Next year will include a new theme for incoming students to crack the code.
