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IEEE SoutheastCon Design Competition

A highlight of the annual IEEE SoutheastCon meeting, held this year April 3 –April 6 in Huntsville, AL, was the Student Hardware Design Competition, “Return to the Moon.” The objective of this year’s competition was:

“To find, retrieve and return to home base, 2-inch cube, wooden blocks with attached RFID tags within the competition time limit of six minutes. The block point values are determined by their color and numbers encoded on
attached RFID tags.”

The Introduction to the design rules stated:

“In the not-too-distant future, mankind has returned to the moon, whereupon valuable mineral deposits have been discovered. Exploration and development of this resource has been licensed to private enterprises. Many organizations, perhaps yours, have decided to enter into a competition to harvest the mineral deposits and return them to Earth. The process is arduous and expensive, and international regulations only permit unmanned, autonomous prospecting robots on the moon. The color and magnetic properties of the mineral deposits are
correlated with their worth. Good luck in your venture!”

The competition required numerous engineering skills, from circuits to machinery, and from microprocessors to dynamics of systems. Members of the VMI and Virginia Tech teams will report on their experiences at this competition, and will demonstrate their robots in action. The IEEE Virginia Mountain Section is pleased to be a supporter of the VMI and VT teams. Please join us on April 17 to learn of the results and experiences from Southeastcon, to support the future leaders of our profession, as well as to meet and socialize with your friends and colleagues.

Date: Thursday, Apr 18, 2008