McCormick students Sam Bobb and RC Yu made themselves some summer money the easy way: They built a race-winning robot. Their remote-free bot scored enough soccer-style goals to beat out 14 other teams to win McCormick’s 17th annual Design Competition on Saturday, nabbing $4,000 in the process.
Bobb said they began working on the robot at the start of Winter Quarter, and “majorly started working on it after DM.”
To win the competition, robots had to be able to pick up six balls and shoot the balls into opponent robots’ goals. The robots could not be larger than a 12-inch cube, and their sport was played out in an eight-by-eight foot arena.
“It’s incredibly difficult to get the robot to go in a straight line, let alone go to where you want it to,” Bobb said.
And what will they do with the dough?
“I’m in McCormick,” Bobb said, “so I’ll probably use it to buy all my expensive engineering books.”