E&S team places third (of 37) at international engineering competition

Ten University of Detroit Mercy electrical engineering students, three faculty members and a robot overcame stiff competition to achieve third place overall at the 15th Annual Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition (IGVC) in Rochester, MI, June 8-11. The competition included design and navigation competitions and an autonomous challenge.

Thirty-seven teams from 30 universities representing the U.S., Canada, India and Japan competed at this year's IGVC. UDM's College of Engineering and Science team, the "CAPACITOPS" placed third overall in the competition behind Omnix 2007, a team from Hosei University in Japan. This is the second year in a row UDM's team has placed in the top three.

The IGVC is an annual international competition created to offer cutting-edge design experience to engineering students. The competition consisted of three challenges. The autonomous challenge requires teams to create a fully autonomous, unmanned ground robot that can navigate an outdoor obstacle course within a specific amount of time, while staying within a given speed limit.

The navigation challenge tests each team vehicles' ability to autonomously travel from one starting point to a number of target destinations through obstacles and return to home base, given only the GPS coordinates of those targets.

"CAPACITOPS" Team (made up of Electrical Engineering majors):

• Kevin Barry, Undergraduate
• Fen-Yuan Chen, Graduate
• Yung Huang Cheng, Graduate
• Lee Desheng, Graduate
• James Gawecki, Undergraduate
• Phillip Gilreath, Undergraduate
• Cheng-Lung Lee, Graduate
• Mimi Nguyen, Undergraduate
• Phuong Nguyen, Undergraduate
• Otis Robinson, Undergraduate

Faculty Advisors:

• Mohan Krishnan, professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering
• Mark Paulik, professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering
• Nassif Rayess, associate professor, Mechanical Engineering
  

UDM team places third in design competition

The UDM mechanical engineering team, "White Lightning," placed third in the 2007 ASME Student Design Contest among a field of 18 entries from 15 universities. The goal of the competition was to create a human-powered water distiller for use in underserved countries. Nassif Rayess, associate professor of Mechanical Engineering, served as the team’s faculty advisor.

Student poster named best

As a result of her research work with Associate Professor of Chemistry/ Biochemistry Katherine Lanigan, UDM student Christine Pitters won the Best Research Poster for Undergraduates at the 2007 ANACHEM conference for analytical chemists. The poster presentation was entitled “Metal Complexation and Photocatalysis Studies of EDTA.” Pitters is currently in her first year of dental school.

Christine Pitters (left) receives award for Best Research Poster at ANACHEM conference.