Team MechatronicsFly and Team E-Home celebrating their success with their mentors, Mr. Alvin Yap (third from right) and Mr. Arun Seelaran (5th from right).
Kuala Lumpur – At the recently concluded Pathfinder Robot Competition 2015, student teams from Asia Pacific University of Technology & Innovation (APU) achieved double honours when Team MechatronicsFly bagged the First Runner-up Prize and Team E-Home, the Best Design Award.
The competition, organised by The University of Nottingham Malaysia in collaboration with the UNMC Student Chapter of Institute of Mechanical Engineers, UNMC Robotics Society, and IEEE attracted 20 teams from public and private universities nationwide. Participants in the competition were required to build their own pathfinder robots, to program and configure the robots, and then to race among each other’s robots on a designated track.
| Team Name | Members |
|
MechatronicsFly Mentor: Mr. Arun Seelaran B. |
1. Obay Fares Alashkar
2. Ubaid Ur Rehman Khan 3. Suhail Sadeq Noman Al-Nabhani 4. Abdul Basit |
|
E-Home Mentor: Mr. Alvin Yap Chee Wei |
1. Haw Wai Kit
2. Huang Jiann Jer 3. Syed Abdullah Medni 4. Andrew Teh Boon Kheng 5. Chan Wai Sum |
The competition operated on the Build, Code, Race concept. At the Build stage, team members collaborated to decide which design and strategy serves the competition better. Materials and tools were provided by the organisers. During the Code stage, the challenge was to design a robot which is autonomous. It must be programmed to cover the whole track on its own, without any external intervention. To achieve this, teams had to come up with a piece of code and use an electronic controller coupled with ultrasonic sensors that would enable the robot to ‘sense’ its surroundings, and decide its direction of motion accordingly. In the final Race stage, the completed robots competed with each other to cover the whole length of a custom-built track in the shortest time possible.
