Lipscomb Engineering Students Secure Third Place in International Robotics Competition
A team of electrical engineering students from Lipscomb participated in RoboCup, an international robotics competition in Eindhoven, Netherlands, in the summer of 2024. Competing against teams from around the world, the students had an opportunity to showcase their skills in robotics programming, image recognition, problem-solving and others. They placed third in their category, the first two being Mexico and England.
Their work started as a class project, and students had to program a robot arm to recognize objects and grab and move them correctly. A lot of it had to do with image recognition, which the students worked on alongside their professor, Dr. Juan Rojas. His Mechatronics class teaches students how to integrate mechanical, electrical, computer and automation technologies to design and maintain advanced systems.
The project is the pinnacle of the class, and its focus is to develop an algorithm to get the robotic arm to complete a bunch of tasks using image recognition. After the course ended, several students stayed around Nashville and continued working on the project, which ultimately allowed them to go to the Netherlands and compete with different teams from various countries.
The goal of RoboCup is to develop a robot soccer team that beats the human world champion team by 2050, and every new development contributes to this goal. The first competition was held in 1997, with over 40 teams participating. Ever since, leading universities and other groups have gathered annually to showcase their work in robotics.
Senior electrical engineering major Kristopher Pesnell, who was on the team, said he was excited to see robotics on the global scale. “There was some really impressive stuff there,” said Pesnell, “It’s good for collaboration, you know, these different countries are kind of working against each other, but towards the same goal. And our competition was an entry into that world.”
He mentioned that there were a lot of sections and contests for various inventions. Their assignment required the programming of the robot to first find the correct item on the table and then recycle it in the correct bin. Pesnell said that his work focused on image recognition. “It’s training a model, and during the training, you’re associating different weights to the images coming into the parameters that it’s looking at. So the end goal was to get it so the camera would look at the cup and say, ‘That’s a blue bottle or blue cup,’ whatever it was.”
The project took the students the whole spring semester and up until the competition, approximately Christmas to July. They were not constructing the robot itself, but rather figuring out ways to program it so that the task would be completed. “It was all in a simulated environment,” said Pesnell. “So then we had two days there to kind of try and get our simulated code to work in a real-life environment, which comes with tons of different challenges.”
Pesnell said that the biggest challenge was finding time amidst other classes and tasks, “Integrating into the real-life environment was a challenge that none of us had ever done before. We’ve got the actual same robot now. Next year, moving forward, the students will get to learn the environment and get this thing to work on.” Pesnell mentioned the robot arm that is located in the Fields building on the Lipscomb campus. Rojas, the professor who initially started the project, got the Engineering department the robotics that can now be used for better research and work on projects.
The Engineering department at Lipscomb now has a real-life model of the arm robot
Mark Smith, a senior electrical engineering major, is enrolled in the Mechatronics class this semester, and he said he was excited about Rojas being his professor. “The way he presents how robotics is going to change the landscape of how we just do manufacturing or even our general lives is fascinating, ” said Smith, “So I think learning from him through that project is a blessing. It’s a lot of new concepts. It’s really about catching up to where he wants you to be so you can actually start learning. It’s just a big learning curve there. But I’m assuming that once we get our feet planted firmly on the ground, we’ll take off running.” Throughout the class, students will be working toward the same project that the previous class presented at RoboCup last summer.
Both Pesnell and Smith talked about engineering being working towards breaking down big problems and finding solutions for each. Smith, a chef in the past, compares this principle with food preparation. “You don’t want to be in the middle of cooking something and realize, ‘Oh, I need a chopped onion and have to start chopping an onion.’ Chop it beforehand, have it ready, and have things portioned out. Everything’s waiting. Set up yourself for success. So whenever the problems come, you have your pieces ready to go.” Pesnell added, “A lot of engineering is actually just breaking problems down as small as you can think. So you’re doing those algorithms, and you use abstraction to just get to focus on that one little spot instead of this big, crazy system of all these things.”
The achievement of the students has brought recognition to the university and opened doors for future collaborations and career opportunities for the students. If you want to learn more about the Engineering department at Lipscomb and the things they do, including various projects and mission work, visit https://lipscomb.edu/engineering.
