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Midwestern Robotics Design Competition

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The AMD Jerry Sanders Creative Design Competition (JSDC) was an annual robotics competition at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where engineering students from around the country design and build robots to compete in a game. After the 28th annual competition in 2015, the competition changed its name to the Midwestern Robotics Design Competition after their main sponsor, Advanced Micro Devices, pulled out. The competition was one of the oldest continuing robotics competitions in the United States and is named after University of Illinois Alumnus and co-founder and longtime CEO of AMD, Jeremiah Sanders III.[1]

Each year, a new game objective is created that tests the skills of the teams in creative design and functionality. Team registration usually ends in mid-January for the competition and is open to any college or university team in March. Some universities, such as UIC, send multiple independent teams to compete.

Teams spend nearly a year designing and constructing their robot for the event, after which students from universities nationwide travel to the UIUC Engineering Open House in March to compete in the 2,000 sq ft (190 m2) arena for the exciting two-day (Fri-Sat) event. MRDC is a popular event that attracts thousands of spectators to take part in the action each day. The Design Competition is made possible by generous funding from ARM and hard work from the MRDC Committee at UIUC.

As the official MRDC website describes, "The competition promotes engineering disciplines and offers students a chance to demonstrate their technical abilities and creativity while applying knowledge learned in engineering courses. Overall, the design competition presents a well-rounded multi-disciplinary engineering challenge to future engineers." [2]

The 23rd annual 2010 competition featured 20 teams from five different universities that competed in a giant game of tic-tac-toe played with colored balloons. The 29th installment of the engineering challenge (2016) promises once again to be an exciting and fun event for everyone involved. The 2016 course will include two levels, and gates that open and close. This will force teams to work on a strategy to get into the inner circle before scoring.

The official website has changed however the old website link will redirect you to their new page.

How To Win

To win the Jerry Sanders Creative Design Competition, it is necessary to design a “cone transportation system” to transport cones to territories in the arena. There are three tiers of territories that award 1, 3, and 5 points when controlled for 10 seconds. Territories controlled at the end of the match are awarded 10, 30, and 40 points. The cone transportation system includes: (1) a vehicle, and (2) a mechanism for picking up and transporting cones. This project aims to design a quadcopter to pick-up and transport cones, as quadcopters are given a 3x point multiplier. With voltage relationship equations for brushless motors, a simulation was developed to determine optimal quadcopter size and rotor type. Thus, the advantages of using a quadcopter were verified.

References

  1. ^ "Goliath Demolishes at Robotics Competition". today.iit.edu. Retrieved 5 February 2020.
  2. ^ "JSDC Official Site". Archived from the original on 2012-07-11. Retrieved 2012-02-20.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/269302240_Design_of_a_quadcopter_for_winning_the_Jerry_Sanders_Creative_Design_Competition

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