Miniature battery-operated robots with carefully wired switchboards swiveled and spun as they wheeled their way through turns and dead ends yesterday in the biannual robot competition, held for students in Computer Science and Engineering 430W (Computer Engineering Project Design).

"The goal of the competition is for the robots to search an 8-by-8-foot maze to find a particular object, pick that object up and then travel to a designated location with the object completely on its own in the fastest time," said Dennis Dunn, director of academic affairs in the department of computer science and engineering.

This competition started in spring 2003 as part of a capstone design course, which is a senior design project required for all computer engineers, Dunn said.

It takes the entire semester to design the robots for this competition, with each person dedicating about 20 hours a week to working on the project, said Bill Donahue (senior-computer engineering).

The assignment requires students to integrate all the information they learned during the semester, he said. "The project was really challenging and a lot of work, but it was really neat to see what we can do with what we have learned this semester," Kyle Drumm (senior-computer engineering) said.

Four teams, with 18 students total, participated in this double elimination tournament in which they were given the task of constructing a completely autonomous robot. The teams were paired in head-to-head competitions, and the team that completed the maze fastest won that bracket.

"What's really fun about this competition is that all of the students work together in a completely open-ended project," Dunn said. "All of the work is done by the students with their own skills and information that they have learned throughout the semester."

The student-made robots attempt to successfully travel through the designated maze without dislodging any walls or knocking down any objects in the maze. The winner of the competition is the team whose robot completes the maze the fastest or travels the farthest in the maze.

The winners of this year's competition included Donahue, Greg Rotondi (senior-computer engineering), John Valentine (senior-computer engineering) and Bradley Volkin (senior-computer engineering).

"Our robot is designed with two encoders that check how far the wheels have gone and sensors on all sides which detect the walls, map out the maze and find the shortest path to the object," Rotondi said. "It has been a lot of work, but it's been really nice to see the robot actually working."

The winning team received the Lockheed Martin Excellence Award, which is a clear glass trophy, and $1,250 to split among the team's members.