Josef Spanbauer says Mason's robotics team is working on their strategy for competitions.
Mason Engineering’s robotics team members are fired up to fine-tune their game strategy after competing at an event in China over winter break.
The group placed ninth out of about 19 university teams at the Asia Open VEX U Robotics Competition in Suzhou, China at the end of December. A Chinese university won first place.
The Mason team, called SciTech Robotics, also received the Design Award for the notebook that best explained the design process for the robot.
The robots were extremely competitive, says Josef Spanbauer, one of the team’s founding members. “It was our first competition for the year, and it was third or fourth for many of the other teams. We definitely learned a lot by watching how they played the game.”
During the event, the robot had to stack cones on mobile goals.The robot ran autonomously for 45 seconds, then Spanbauer or his teammate Andrew Bender ran it for one minute and 15 seconds. SciTech Robotics won five of its matches and lost three at the Asian competition.
“We have a lot of preparation to do if we are going to be beating these teams in April at the world championship,” says Spanbauer, a Northern Virginia Community College student who’ll be dual enrolled in NOVA and Mason next year as a mechanical engineering major. He’s currently interning for Micron Technology, the team’s primary sponsor.
SciTech Robotics must qualify at a competition in the United States before it can progress to the VEX Robotics World Championship in Louisville, Kentucky. Last year, the group finished third.
Since returning from the Asian competition, the team has been redesigning and rebuilding the robot so it’s faster and more efficient, says Payton Blodgett, a sophomore mechanical engineering major who is in charge of the design notebook, “We have a long road ahead of us, but I believe the experience in China gives us a leg up over other teams.”
Bender, BS Electrical Engineering, ’17, who's getting a master’s degree in electrical engineering, writes the software program for the robot to run autonomously, as well as under operator control. “I know what I need to do software-wise on our robot to get ahead of the competition.”
Other team members include Matthew Reichley, a junior in mechanical engineering; Afnan Ali, a sophomore in computer engineering; and Bradley Christianson, a sophomore in civil engineering.