The Oregon State University DAM Robotics Club won first place in an international competition in early August, the second time they’ve placed first. The team won the Canadian International Rover Challenge, competing against 25 other post-secondary student design teams from around the world at a four-day event held in Alberta, Canada.
Competitors simulate the conditions of colonizing another planet and bring a prototype rover to help them accomplish challenging scenarios. The rovers traverse varying terrain, must do autonomous operations and operate a dexterous arm among other tasks. The challenges encourage and reward innovative and creative design. The club has been competing at CIRC for seven years (with a gap in 2020 during the pandemic).
The DAM Robotics Club is the largest student-led organization on campus with 200 members. It’s open to all students with an interest in robotics, regardless of major. Alumni have gone on to work at places including NVIDIA, Intel, SpaceX and also have become robotics faculty members at major universities.
Henry Dalrymple is a computer science major who has been part of the club since he started at OSU and was a project lead on the rover that won this year’s competition.
“CIRC is a very demanding competition from a technical standpoint. The rover must be able to move, sense, manipulate and transmit data in many different scenarios,” Dalrymple said. “With relatively limited manpower, we had to be very efficient with our time management. Learning how to properly scope what tasks are important, how much time each should take and working together to match deadlines to integrate everything properly was the sector I gained the most knowledge from this year.”
Mechanical engineering student Olivia Gehrke said her favorite challenge during the competition was the “Mars and Murder” task, which involved using the rover’s arm to carry a small dummy, mainly because it was amusing to watch the rover carry the limp dummy around the field. Gehrke’s main job was scoring strategy, deciding which tasks would garner the team the most points.
“On top of that you never really know how each task will go until the task has begun, so I was also creating contingency plans for if certain parts of the robot failed to see how many points we could receive,” Gehrke said.
The final task had the team sweating. The rover had to traverse to preset locations and scan an ArUco marker, which is like a simplified QR code.
“Our communications had been shaky the entire competition and the last marker was behind a hill. Watching and willing the rover forward when communications started failing and then the excitement and relief when our rover communications pulled through just enough to allow us to scan the last marker was particularly memorable,” said robotics major Jared Northrop. “This final marker ended up being the difference maker in our score.”
For mechanical engineering student Osian Leahy, being a part of the club and participating in competitions means gaining multidisciplinary skills.
“You get the chance to collaborate on mechanical, electrical, and software systems,” Leahy said. “The integration details of the whole system are more important than any single part. I want to go into the robotics/mechatronics industry once I finish my master’s degree, but even if I eventually change fields, I think the key ideas of systems level thinking will stick with me.”
Dalrymple said he knows the skills he’s gained from participating in the club will help him in the future.
“Participation in this competition does have some merit towards my career goals. Mainly, that companies such as Protospace Manufacturing directly sponsor and make the event possible, creating a strong connection to industry directly,” he said. “The amount of knowledge I have gained to even make it into the competition is superbly marketable to any field of engineering I wish to go into, not just robotics.”
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