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Engineering Students Place at Regional Robot Competition

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Nine Oral Roberts University engineering students recently returned from the annual American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) regional student leadership conference, held at LeTourneau University in Longview, Texas. They received second place in the student design contest with the ORU Spirit, a remote-controlled mine-sweeping robot.

There were 24 entries in this contest from schools such as Texas A&M, Tulane, University of Houston, University of New Orleans, University of Louisiana-Lafayette, Southern University, LeTourneau, and several top schools from Mexico. The robotic vehicle was designed to crawl over barriers twice its size in order to circumnavigate a simulated mine field, and retrieve cylinders of various sizes. The robot had to fit in an area that is 1 foot wide, 1 foot long, and 1.5 feet high and still accomplish every task the course required.

Students Dan Ashby, Abigail Wade, Miguel Matos, Jason Dickinson, Sergio Resendiz, Scott Nelson, and Chris McFarland began work on the robot project last September. The project was directed by Dr. Dominic Halsmer, chairman of engineering and physics, with assistance from Randy Iwanaga, departmental technician and machinist.

"This was a very challenging problem, but the students persevered with the help of Mr. Iwanaga, our technician," said Dr. Halsmer. "We really didn't know if the idea for the robot vehicle was going to succeed, but we just kept working on it, refining the design until it was ready to compete. The students learned a lot of practical lessons during this hands-on project that I know they will never forget."