Huskerbots, the UNL robotics team led by Santosh Pitla and Yufeng Ge, placed second at the ASABE international competition in Spokane last week. Students on the team--Abbas Atefi, Cheetown Liew, Piyush Pandey, Lukas Renker, Hesan Sedaghat, and Jenny Wynn--competed against 18 other teams.
In the ASABE Robotics Student Design Competition, undergraduate and graduate students build a robot or group of robots to carry out an agricultural task. The robots must be fully autonomous and able to complete the task without human intervention.
"The task for this year’s challenge was a difficult one in comparison to challenges from the past few years," Pitla said. "The team worked really hard throughout the year and went through ups and downs during the design and testing process. What I really liked about the team was that the students didn’t give up until the end, which made all the difference."
This year’s task involved mechanical design, software code development, sensor instrumentation, and machine vision.
"Integrating all these facets of the robot and going from concept stage to development, testing and evaluation were some of the very important tasks students accomplished during this experience," Pitla said. "We hope to develop a universitywide student robotics team in the coming years as the competition demands interdisciplinary skills involving the understanding of agriculture, mechanical design, electronics, software programming, sensing, and wireless communication."
More information on the competition can be found here: https://www.asabe.org/awards-landmarks/student-awards,-competitions-scholarships/robotics-competition.aspx