Team of BEng in Mechanical Engineering (ME) students won the 2nd Runner-up in the 2019 American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Student Design Competition (SDC) Finals held on 9 November 2019, in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. The ASME SDC Finals, sponsored by Boeing every year, is a well-known international student design competition of its kind. The 14 competitors, each are from the regional SDC events held at the ASME Engineering Festivals.
“The Pick-and-Place Race”, the theme of this year, is to challenge students to design a speedy robots that could quickly grasp various size of balls – small as ping pong to as large as basketballs running in its full speed without dropping off the balls in the competition field. The first 15 seconds is decisive for the winner.
Our team, comprising year four undergraduate students, Parth MAHESHWARI, Maral SHAGATAY and KWAN Kai Lok, supervised by Ir Dr Curtis NG of ME developed an agile robot which can swiftly moving around pick and hold different sizes of balls . With tactical strategy, our robot stood out from other competing robots and eventually made it to the Final Four and brought home the 2nd Runner-up!
“Our students were wholly dedicated to this challenge. They were highly self-motivated to work on the prototype and well prepared for the competition. With great support from Prof. SQ Shi (Head of Department of ME, PolyU), ME technical team, International Affairs Office (IAO) and Industrial Centre (IC), our robot could manage to compete with other strong competitors in ASME SDC Finals 2019 and took the 2nd Runner-up. “Students are excited with their achievement and we are highly proud of them.” Ir Dr Curtis NG said.
The competition was held in conjunction with the ASME’s 2019 International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition (IMECE) in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA.
