Stan’s Obligatory Blog

It’s springtime at Caltech. Which means it’s time for the ME72 engineering contest. I enjoy watching this whenever I can, since it’s always good geeky entertainment.

This year’s contest was to build machines to collect bottles and cans for recycling. The bottles and cans were spread around on the concrete, and they also had some on a set of ‘terrains’ for the machines to drive on. The terrains included a shipping pallet, some rocks, sand, and water. At the far end of the playing field, each team had three boxes for each of plastic, steel, and aluminum. They got points for getting the containers down to the boxes, more points for getting them in the boxes, and still more if they could do all that and get their machines back to the starting line before the end of each 5-minute match.

Each team built two machines for the task, and as always, some of the machines were designed solely to interfere with the operation of the other team’s machines. So we got to see some good machine clashes, which is always a hoot. In the end, Team BRB won with a good basic strategy. They had one machine that quickly scored at the start of the round, and then it and the other machine would attack and pin down the other team’s machines so that they couldn’t score. And that strategy brought them the trophy in the end.

All good geek fun.