The Conquest of Millikan Islands

The Mission

The fundamental challenge of engineering is solving problems while meeting basic constraints. The ME72 students were tasked to design, build, and operate under manual and/or autonomous control a team of vehicles that will:

• Retrieve Ping-Pong balls from a land-based dispenser.
• Place these balls in island containers in the water.
• Navigate autonomously to deposit a ball on an island in the autonomous zone.
• Return from, and exit, the autonomous zone.
• Compete with the opposing team to reduce their score while maintaining their own.

Design Challenges

The contest period is divided into rounds. Each round consists of 5 minute heats, where a heat consists of a head-to-head competition between two teams. After two losses a team will be eliminated from the competition. Each heat is divided into these 4 main intervals. The winner will be the team with the most points at the end of the competition.