Held every year in summer, the UBC Engineering Physics Robot Competition has served as a kind of trial by fire for generations upon generations of second-year engineering physics students. Team of 3 or 4 students get together and over the course of 5 intense weeks design, build, and troubleshoot an autonomous robot capable of completing a pre-defined task.

This year, the theme is Mission Impossible Bots, and our task was to build self-driving cars to rescue six trapped secret agents by avoiding an alarmed door, driving up a narrow ramp, rescuing the agents from a tank filling with water and sending the agents back to safety on a zipline while obeying additional rules

To tackle this challenge, we dubbed ourselves “Walkerville Elementary” and got started on the Magic School Bot right away. Though the magic school bot might have started life as a cardboard prototype, by the end of the 5 weeks of build time it proved to a robot we could all be proud of.

Cindy checking the battery for the magic school bot just before runtime

Thanks to our hard work, we achieved third place in the competition. We each got a raspberry pi, which was nice.

Finally, we’d like to thank everyone who made the course such a success: Andre, Jon, and Bernhard for being awesome teachers who were always available to help, and Connor S, Connor H, and Reily for being fabulous TAs who kept the lab open and were super helpful in debugging issues.