Sponge Wars: Attack of the Drones!

The Mission

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

• Retrieve dry kitchen sponges from a four-foot high platform,
• Place these sponges in goals their team controls,
• Navigate autonomously to place sponges in their autonomous goal.
• Maintain their own score while reducing the opposing team's score by blocking and by having their vehicles contact buttons to switch goal control (and points) to their team.

Design Challenges

The competition is divided into rounds. Each round consists of 4-minute heats among the remaining teams, where a heat consists of a head-to-head contest between two teams. During the heat's first 5 seconds, teams may not interfere with each other, but after that they may engage in both offensive and defensive moves. The team with the most points at the end of the heat wins. After two losses, a team will be eliminated from the competition.