Autonomous Robot Competition

As part of the Mechanical Engineering curriculum, every student completes ME2110, a project-based course where teams design and build autonomous robots to score points by interacting with elements of a competition arena, culminating in a head-to-head tournament at the end of the semester.

During the Fall 2024 competition, my team and I built a robot that finished 4th out of 66 total teams.

In each competition round, our robot completed the following tasks:

• Extended into the center of the arena to collect objects from a rotating platform

• Retracted to bring the objects back to our starting zone for bonus points

• Deposited a ball into each of the four colored slots on the sides of the rotating platform

• Raised a figurine using a telescopic arm and hung it on the top rung of a ladder

Throughout the design process, we relied on Quality Function Deployment (QFD) tools to guide our decisions:

• A House of Quality to convert customer needs into measurable engineering requirements

• A Function Decomposition Tree to define the minimum functions our robot needed to perform

• A Morphological Matrix to generate multiple approaches for each function, combined to create alternative designs

• A Pugh Matrix to evaluate those alternatives against our requirements and select a final design

As Design Lead, I translated our alternative design concepts into 3D models in SolidWorks, giving the team a full, equal comparison of each alternative before selection. I also owned CAD implementation for every design iteration of our final robot throughout the build process.

Beyond the result, this project was one of the most valuable learning experiences of my undergraduate career. It taught me how to apply structured QFD methods to drive design decisions, how to bring a design to life through rapid prototyping methods like 3D printing and laser cutting, and how important testing is for achieving repeatable results.