A five-student engineering team took first place at the regional collegiate robotics competition this month, beating out ten other university entries with an autonomous rover designed to navigate unmarked terrain without GPS.
The team spent eight months building and testing the rover in a converted lab space, working around a shared equipment schedule with two other research groups.
"We rebuilt the navigation system three times," said the team's lead. "The version that won isn't close to the version we started with in January."