Awards & RecognitionChemical engineering professor impresses national engineering education organization

National organization recognizes student's achievments

Faculty member recognized for dedication to students

Boeing—the world’s leading aerospace company—selects BCoE aerospace professor for Boeing Welliver Faculty Fellowship Program

BCoE & MSU Quick LinkBagley College of Engineering

Mississippi State University

Alumni Foundation

Giving

Special Podcast Release    "Science Guy" visits MSU
Thanks to his energetic performances on television, Bill Nye is known to most as the “Science Guy,” but during a recent visit to MSU he reveled his other passions. Nye is a strong supporter of science education because he knows the future of our world will soon be in the hands of today’s children. While visiting campus, he also took the time to discuss hybrid vehicles with members of the BCoE’s national champion Challenge X team. Nye was given the opportunity to drive the vehicle and inspect the students’ craftsmanship while examining the inner-workings of the car.
Click here to listen.

Momentum Preview    Click here to download and see Momentum before it goes out in the mail. Hard copies will be arriving in your mailboxes later this May.

ECE students get grabby

By the time Bagley College of Engineering students become seniors, working within their majors comes naturally, causing fundamentals to seem rudimentary and the budding engineers to look to flashier methods of problem-solving. However, students in electrical and computer engineering overcame that pitfall to grasp the meaning of teamwork and analytical thinking for success in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Annual Student Hardware Competition.

“We went through five or six ideas trying to decide on the best methods to use to accomplish our tasks for this competition. At one point we were even going to use a type of laser detection,” explained Theresa Weisenberger, team captain. “Eventually we saw that for this competition, it was better to stick to a simpler design.”

The competition required the student team to design and build an autonomous robot that could detect and collect different colored blocks. The colors denoted different point values, meaning that the robot had to distinguish between them in order to collect the four most valuable. With their tasks laid out and limited only by their imaginations, the team members worked for two semesters to devise the best methods to defeat the 41 other university teams represented at the event.

"Our main goal was to be in the top eight after the first round and advance to the head-to-head part of the competition,” Weisenberger said. “We worked to account for all the different competition variables and build a strong robot, because competition success was about more than collecting blocks. To do well, you have to account for things that you wouldn’t necessarily think about at first.”

Weisenberger explained that just because something seemed like a logical solution didn’t mean it was the right idea to use for this competition. For example, an onboard compass might help the robot navigate around the rocky course, however any metal in the uncontrollable, surrounding environment would cause it to malfunction. Robotic arms appeared to be fitting for the task of collecting blocks, but visualization problems and an inaccurate aim made them unreliable in competition.

“There were eight of us on the team, each with different experiences to draw from. After testing and discussing different ideas, we were able to design a robot that could detect and collect blocks by simply driving over them,” Weisenberger said. “If our robot drove over something, a switch would flip letting it know that something was there and the algorithms we used told it whether or not it was something to pick up. Our construction and design allowed us not to have to worry as much about accuracy or displacement.”

Completing the design of the robot, named LUNAR for lunar unmanned navigation and acquisition robot, well in advance of the competition, the team spent much of its time testing its abilities and refining its visualization techniques. Team members worked on fine-tuning their machine until the wee hours before the contest began. The hard work paid off as MSU’s team outscored their closest competition by 25 points in the first round.

“At the competition, I was surprised to see that some teams had used the ideas we decided against. Throughout the competition we saw robots’ compasses going haywire, arms malfunctioning and even machines getting stuck on the course, all of which confirmed the suspicions we had during our design stage,” Weisenberger noted. “I believe our robot was the most tested, and other people said it was the most fundamentally sound.”

First-round success earned LUNAR the top seed in the head-to-head part of the event. With multiple robots on the course at once, vying for the same blocks, the competition became intense. Although MSU’s team had been diligent in testing and accounting for all of the variables in their control, they could not prepare for the wounds inflicted by the other robots.

“We spent a lot of time on visualization and distinguishing between objects on the course. Other robots just sensed something and grabbed at it assuming it was a block. Unfortunately, sometimes it was our robot they ended up trying to retrieve,” Weisenberger recalled. “Having spent two semesters building our robot, it was like watching your child getting beaten up.”

A collision with another team’s robot caused LUNAR to loose part of its visual abilities, which ultimately caused the team to lose the final match and bring home second place. LUNAR was on track to bring home MSU’s second first-place finish in two years, when a faulty sensor caused it to hit the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s (UAB) robot, which had been immobilized by an awkwardly placed block. The nudge from MSU’s robot freed UAB’s machine allowing them to take top honors.

“For the eight of us on the team, this was our senior design project, and even though we came in second place, we learned a lot,” Weisenberger said. “We had a really strong team and we learned to work well together. Brian Reese, one of the team members said, ‘If you took away one of our team members, our robot would not have been complete,’ and he was right. It would not have been the same without everyone’s input.”

By: Susan Lassetter