Purdue’s ACM SIGbots teams won world championship in Dallas last month.
VEX U is the organization that holds university robotics competitions with more than 200 teams competing annually.
“You basically build two robots that do different tasks. This year, we were supposed to grab balls and score them into goals, and do it as fast as possible,” said team lead Dominic Holifield, a recent graduate in mechanical engineering.
VEX U competition guidelines change each year, which summons inventive robot building and team strategy.
“It included a lot of CAD and figuring out what our robots have to do. Sometimes we use Vex parts, and other things are made custom,” said recent industrial engineering graduate Stephen Hohnholt. “This year our chassis were a little different because there was a center barrier, so we needed additional wheels.”
Custom parts were built using a laser-cutting machine and a 3D-printing polymaker filament.
“Besides the mechanical design, oftentimes your software is different for each year,” said Joe Lach, a junior in mechanical engineering.
Purdue’s ACM organization, or Association for Computational Machinery, offers SIG, or special interest groups, for students. SigApp is centered on app building, SigGd creates video game graphics, and SigBots builds robots that compete in VEX U Robotics competitions.
“There is a bit of overlap within the different ACM groups. Some members from different teams have worked and collaborated with others,” said Jacob Zawacki, a junior in marketing and finance. “Last year, one of the SIG groups developed an AI system for our robot that recognized objects in the field, and one of our members has worked to develop an app for scoring.”
The regular season consists of 10-team university held events where groups smooth out game plans and fix problems ahead of divisional matches and championships. Point-based matches are two minutes long, and robots perform preprogrammed movements and are driver controlled where teams go head to head.
“You want to have a strategy that people 100% don’t know about, because if they know your game plan, it’s easier to defend against. We even had mechanical things on our robot that would give us an edge that we didn’t show until we played elimination matches,” Hohnholt said.
Purdue’s SIGBot team has had a stellar record over the last few years, but the team had one opponent on their minds as they started the journey to the world champions stage: Wisconsin Platteville.
“They were our No. 1 target for the event, and the team that we had lost to twice the past two years,” Holifield said. “This year it was one of the biggest matches, one of the best teams we were going to face. After them, we were able to beat the rest of the teams pretty easily.”
After beating the Wisconsin team and going undefeated prior – knocking down Arkansas Tech, UCF, and Tec De Monterrey - they faced Cal Poly in the finals.
“Some of us had some nerves and stress going into it,” Lach said. “We played by far our best match we had played all season on the biggest stage. After a year's worth of work, going unbeatable and taking the trophy at the end was just phenomenal.”
The Purdue SigBot team also took home the design award and the community award, which they attributed to the club's Techpoint Coding Hotline and their Purdue SIGBots Wiki page.
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