Robot Project is Complete
I got up this morning at 7am so I could meet up with my group members at the Technology building at 8am. We weren’t allowed into the room we’d be showing in until 9am so we spent the extra time going over the presentation and nervously pacing around.
At 9am we entered our room and had everything set up and tested in a matter of minutes. Our presentation didn’t actually start until 10:25 so that left us with a lot more time to think about what was coming. We taped up the poster I made the other night:
and waited for the judges to arrive.
What we had to do today was perform a 45-50 minutes presentation on the entirity of the robot. Basically, what we did, how we approached each system and subsystem, how we solved specific problems, how we did system-level testing on the finished product, our budget, future reccomendations, etc.
Our three judges arrived a little before 10:25 and we got started on the presentation. Everything went great and we did an excellent job timing out the presentation. We did the actual run of the robot for the judges and it did almost everything correctly (it missed one dot on the PC application). They were very pleased and really only asked us one or two questions. After the presentation we went our seperate ways until 4pm when the graduating seniors were to meet for food, gifts, awards, and open house.
We ate catered sandwiches and each of us received a ECET paper weight and a School of Technology business card holder :) After that we had headshots taken, and a large group photo of the graduating class. Once that was done we had a bit of open house to endure before the awards were to be handed out.
We spent the time fighting our robot with other worthy contenders:
Around 6PM, everyone gathered up to attend the awards “ceremony.” The first few awards went to students who did exceptional jobs in the “accelerated” track for seniors. That means they did their senior project (design + fabrication) in only one semester instead of two. The next award went to the outstanding Computer Engineering Technology groups project.
Some quick background: CPeT majors (like me) are required to work in a group project on a robot for their senior project. ECET majors have a more involved senior project where they can choose what they’d like to do and they have to get it approved before design work can begin.
Anyways, we got the award for best robot. The faculty told us that our product (robot) and presentation were the best they’d ever seen. The presentation, we were told, was especially well-laid-out and our use of color-coding made it stand out above the other presentations. Our award was this sheet of paper (in a nice holder):
Our group also received a $250 dollar prize split between us. After taxes that comes out to about $50 a piece I think. We were so excited and proud. We’ve probably put well over 300 man-hours into this project (between the three of us) and I think it really came out in everything we did!
Here’s some more pics:
An excellent end to that course ;)