Calculated maneuvers and solid design earned a team of University of Houston engineering students a first place win at the Texas VEX Robotics Championship at Galena Park High School recently.
The UH group beat teams from Rice University and the University of Texas for the top spot in the March 13 event’s College Challenge. A first for UH students, the team will test their skills again next month against the best in VEX at the 2010 VEX Robotics Competition World Championship in Dallas.
“It’s kind of like tug-of-war without the rope,” said VEX team member and freshman mechanical engineering major Hilario Torres, “just with some of the best teams internationally.”
The world event will bring college participants together to face off in several rounds of competition with two VEX robots constructed and programmed to complete tasks identical to what was faced locally.
For the Houston event, two robot pairs were placed on either side of a 12-foot by 12-foot square, walled competition field. Separated down the center with a low barrier, each robot team was tasked with locating and throwing different sized balls—ranging in point value—onto its opponents’ side during a 60-second autonomous period. In the second part of the match, the robots were tasked with the same mission, only this time for 80 seconds, while being remotely controlled by an operator.
Catering for years to middle and high school students, dozens of VEX robotics competitions are held annually. Only last year were they first opened to college teams.
Torres and his team members—An Nguyen, Ryan Lee, Khary J. Bentick, Chris Lin, Pedro Cervantes, Gabriel Lugo, Ronald Barahona and Pablo Zamarripa Pesquera—were the first UH students to ever compete in the event. Each are members of the UH Robotics Team, a group that only became an official university student organization this semester.
Though elated by the win, celebration for these students was short lived. Already, they are working on some hefty adjustments to their robots to ensure they are even more competitive against the 35 other VEX robotics teams expected at the world competition in Dallas April 22-24.
“We will be doing a lot of programming during the next month,” Torres said, noting they are also looking at reworking one their two robots whose performance wasn’t as strong as their first model.