Student teams battle their sustainable waste-sorting robots at the second annual FAS Competition

March 04, 2019
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See the photo album of the event here: http://ow.ly/JMUZ30nVdjO

Last Wednesday evening, teams of Faculty of Applied Sciences (FAS) students arrived at the SFU Surrey Mezzanine to battle their sustainably-designed waste-sorting robots. These “eco-bots” were built as a part of the second annual FAS competition that challenges students to apply their skills in engineering design, computer programming, team work, and public presentation.

Since September, student teams have been tasked with designing a robot that can sort organic and non-organic waste. The final competition on Wednesday required the robots to demonstrate their ability to successfully pick up and sort grapes (representing organic waste) and marbles (representing non-organic waste).

Attendees sat at the edge of their seats as the excitement in the competition area starting to build up. Some of the eco-bots faced technical issues—a robot started travelling backwards, another had a wheel come off, while marbles would interfere with one robot’s movement, and grapes jammed another. Regardless, the teams managed to troubleshoot the issues and were able to successfully complete the challenge.

In the end, only one team could take home the grand prize of $1800. In additional to placement prizes, there was a Technical Achievement Award, as well as a People’s Choice Award that attendees could vote for by scanning a QR code at the team tables. The medals for the placement prizes and People’s Choice Award were produced by the School of Engineering Science using recycled wood.

The complete list of winners is below:

First Place ($1800) – Greenbot
Neeraj Bansal, Ramy ElMallah, Muhannad Fahmy, Kelvin Lee, James Liu

Second Place ($900) and People’s Choice – Tree Amigos
Muhammad Abid, Benjamin Atbi, Joshua Fritsch, Joanna Li, Shawn Liu, Tony Shen

Third Place ($450) and Technical Achievement – MecoBot
Vincent Chi, Emma Liu, Yui Tsui, Kevin Wang, Yanming Wu, Joseph Zhu