In the first week of November, Iowa State’s Industrial Technology (ITec) club traveledto Cincinnati, Ohio to attend the  Association of Technology, Management, and Applied Engineering (ATMAE) conference and compete in the annual robotics competition.

The team left on a Monday and returned the following Saturday after spending the week gaining knowledge about technology management and applied engineering.

According to the “ABE Technology Programs Recognized at ATMAE Conference” by  Elaine Phompheng, the conference, “included 11 undergraduate ITec students, ITec academic adviser Tamara Kerns, and eight ABE and IAT graduate students. Faculty attendees were Steve Mickelson, Shweta Chopra, Steve Freeman, John Haughery, Gretchen Mosher, and Charles Schwab.” Iowa State’s team has been competing on and off for the past fifteen years at this competition.

This year at the robotics competition, Iowa State’s team won first place in people’s choice and received third overall. At the competition last fall, the team did not place and this fall they jumped all the way up to third place overall. The overall score is compiled of three different categories.

Team member Benjamin Gibson helped with software and electrical apset of the robot. Gibson elaborated on each of the areas of the competition.

“The first was a technical report which is a report that ideally is all the information that somebody would need to know to build the robot,” Gibson said.

The technical report is due about two weeks before the competition.

The next part of the competition included giving a presentation to a panel of judges at the competition.

“We talked about what each of us did, various aspects of our robot, how we thought we could do better, or the kid of technology or research being integrated into developing the robot,” Gibson said.

The final category in the competition involves various challenges for the robot to perform and each year there is a different theme. This year the theme was manipulation of a hacky sack.

The secretary of the ITec club, Nicholas Keech spoke about how much the team improved from last year to this year.

Preparing for the competition this year was slightly stressful because a bulk of the work from September until the competition on November.

“This year we started pretty lat in the preparation, so we had to do a lot in a small amount of time,” Keech said. “Up until even the week of leaving for the competition, we did not have a fully functioning robot for what we needed to have it do, so it was very quick that we got that all done.”

Gibson also spoke about last minute preparations.

“We were literally building until the day of the competition,” Gibson said. “We were still cutting wood and gluing things in the hotel room.

Because of the time crunch, the team was slightly worried they would not get it done in time for the competition. They discussed that if it were not complete in time that they would just have to go with what they had. Luckily, the team pulled through to finish the robot in time, but they realized that they would gain knowledge even if they had just been able to attend the conference.

“We kind of talked about…we were obviously going for the robot competition and for the conference and that it would be a great experience either way because the conference is so beneficial to our experience and our careers,” Keech said.

The conference was a two day event filled with various speakers who were professionals in the Industrial Technology field.

“We got to go to all kinds of sessions where we heard from a lot of doctors and heard about their dissertations and the projects that they were working on,” Keech said. We heard from all kinds of people in the industry who were really really intelligent at what they did.”

The team is currently on a break since the last competition and will re-gorup again in January when the rules for the 2018 competition get released. If you want to find out more about the ITec club take a look at their social media.

https://www.stuorg.iastate.edu/site/itec

https://www.facebook.com/ISUITecClub/

Twitter: @ISU_ITEC_Club