“Fishing Bots” was the theme for Virginia Western Community College’s 16th annual Autonomous Robot Competition. Here is more on the event from Virginia Western faculty member George Studtmann:
Virginia Western hosted its annual Autonomous Robot Competition on Saturday, Dec. 7.
Teams were required to design and build an autonomous fishing robot that successfully gathered up to seven wooden fish while identifying three fishing spots with missing fish, all randomly placed in three lakes, and deliver the seven caught fish to either of two fishing stations in a timely fashion.
Twelve teams from local high schools and Virginia Western competed. The Botetourt Technical Educational Center hosted three teams and Cave Spring High School hosted two teams.
Teams competed in five trials, completed a technical report and presented before engineering and STEM judges. Four new judges from Metalsa attended. Awards were presented to the top three teams for high school and college.
The winning team for college was called Fishcakes and scored a total of 367 out of 435 points. Ben Bellino and Nick Powers are VWCC Mechatronics students. Winners are shown with Dr. Arnold Yim of the Math Department, a co-director of the competition.
The winning high school team from the VWCC Academy, and overall competition champion, was The Steel Peel Bananas, consisting of juniors Eli Evans, Ben Escalera and Dominic Thomas. The Steel Peel Bananas scored 421 out of 435, and their robot performed all five trials perfectly.
