1961 East Mall (click here for parking and directions)
Overview
54 second-year students in UBC Engineering Physics course go head-to-head with their autonomous wall-climbing robots
Registration
No registration required. However, if bringing a group of 4 or more, please contact Jon Nakane for further details about attending the event.
Fourteen teams of UBC Engineering Physics students are set to compete in “Climber-bots”, the 11th Annual UBC Engineering Physics Robot Competition. Unlike any previous competition, this year’s robots will be crawling, grabbing, and lifting themselves straight up an 8-foot tall vertical wall. Once at the top, robots will have to grab onto a “zip-line” and ride down to the finish line to victory. And doing all of this on its own, without any remote controls or human interference!
These robots, all less than 1 foot tall, will will scale the vertical climbing wall using only the holes and slots cut into the wall. Robots have a limited time to make the climb, and constantly run the risk of dropping from the wall and falling straight to the floor.
Each robot was designed and fabricated by a group of 3 or 4 second-year students, using a combination of team-designed sensors, mechanical components, motors and software programs to detect the holes and reach for the top. With this year’s challenge, each of the 14 student-designed robots visually looks highly different from one another – while some look like mechanical vehicles with single arms reaching up to grab the next hole, other robots more closely resemble living creatures, 2-armed animals reaching up hand over hand to scale the wall. The robots will do well to entertain the family, friends, Engineering Physics supporters and all other attendees at this year’s competition.
Since 2001, more than 500 UBC Engineering Physics students have gone through this hands-on prototyping course as part of their academic program. The challenge changes from year to year, with previous competitions including Rescue-bots, Hockey-bots, Doctor-bots, Volley-bots, Police-Bots, and a host of other entertaining challenges. This 13-week crash-course in prototyping gives all 54 students enrolled in Engineering Physics the chance to design every aspect of their robot designs – all of the electronics and mechanics and computer programs are done by the students in groups of 4, making use of UBC Engineering Physics’s in-house prototyping facilities.
