Awards & Recognition • Mississippi State student engineering teams earn regional awards
• Adrienne Minerick awarded NSF CAREER Award
• Computer engineering major receives NSF fellowship

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Ping’s basketball shooting percentage is around 98 percent from any position on the court.  Not bad for a one-foot electronic robot that uses a digital camera to focus on the basketball hoop, which stands about three feet off the ground.  For electrical and computer engineering students Ping has become sort of their hero.  They spent 3,000 hours and countless weekends building the miniature-shooting robot that won them the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers Southeast Region 3 (SECON) 2007 Competition.

 “Every year the IEEE sponsors a hardware competition to bring, faculty, students and the professional world together; this year the competition was held in Richmond, Virginia,” said Faculty Adviser and Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Bryan Jones.  “This year the tournament was pretty tough and really intense, your robot had to move quickly, position itself and shoot accurately.”

Thirty-seven student teams from the southeast region were asked to build a robot that could play a modified version of say ping-pong and basketball.  The independently operated robot uses computer code and sensors to move and stay within the white line boundaries that resemble a basketball floor. Ping’s digital camera recognizes and focuses on a red basketball hoop and its computer program talks to the motion code of the robot to position, line-up and shoot a ping-pong ball into the basket. The team with the robot shooting the most balls into the basket in the quickest amount of time advances to the next round of competition.

Building Ping required the eight-member student team to use a cross disciplinary approach.  Students’ with expertise in mechanical, electrical and computer engineering   split into two teams. One group concentrated on creating the top half of the robot that is the tracking and gun portion.  The other built the bottom half, which is the locomotion that moves the robot and collects the necessary code for accurate positioning.  For the entire team to experience success the students had to keep in mind a whole systems approach: Thinking of the robot as a whole versus two separate parts.

Evan Dozier a senior in computer engineering said, “ The engineering college here did a good job of teaching us how to be effective in our teaming and allocation of skills for building the different areas of the robot.” 

The IEEE releases a set of rules to each college that stipulates the basic operations of the robot.  The MSU team began designing their robot in July of 2006.  By Thanksgiving they had built their first proto-type.  After returning from the holiday break they designed and built “Ping,” improving the robot’s speed by an entire minute.

Heather Hickman is a senior electrical engineer major and points out that “It’s kind of challenging because in class you’re given a task and directions on how to solve it, here we had perimeters to work within but we had to develop the way we were going to build it from concept to completion.”
 
The double elimination tournament was set-up much like the NCAA “Road to the Final Four.”  The BCoE student team lost their first game and fought their way back to the championship, winning 12 rounds of competition to capture the “IEEE REGION 3 CHAMPIONSHIP” title.

David Warren a senior in computer engineering adds that when interviewing for a job employers ask for experience and examples of project execution, “Ping is a great demo we can use to describe our experiences about project management, allocating resources, delegation, and building relationships.” 

Three of the team members have jobs waiting for them after they graduate. The other five are considering job offers or continuing their education at the graduate and doctorate levels.

Team Members:

Benjamin Payment
David Warren
Michael Peach
Ryan Irwin
Austin Walton
Heather Hickman
Evan Dozier
Jeffrey Fairley

Story by: Diane L. Godwin