IEEE SoutheastCon is the annual conference for Region 3 of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. This event includes several competitions, one of which is the hardware competition. The purpose of the project outlined in the present website is to compete in, and win, the 2015 SoutheastCon Hardware Competition. In order to do this, an autonomous robot will be designed in accordance with the competition rules.
This year’s competition, held in Ft. Lauderdale, has a “road trip” theme. The robot will need to navigate along a course represented by a white line on a black background. Along the course, 4 different classic road trip toys will be “played with.” These include a Rubik’s Cube, the Simon Says game, an Etch-a-Sketch, and a deck of playing cards. In order to win the competition, the robot must complete the course as quickly as possible, completing the challenges without error in less than 5 minutes.
Team 1A’s robot employed a combination of custom designed components in order to complete the challenges. A fully functioning prototype robot was built that successfully won the local school competition and placed 7th out of 39 schools in Ft. Lauderdale.