CSUN extended its winning streak to four years straight in the 2014 international Intelligent Ground Vehicle (IGV) competition last June, when an interdisciplinary team made up of mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and computer engineering students captured second place in the annual contest. The IGV competition challenges students to design and assemble a fully autonomous, unmanned ground vehicle that can navigate an obstacle course and perform assigned tasks. CSUN teams have taken part for nine years, and for the past four, their robots have placed either first or second in the overall Grand Awards.
“We have very talented students, and they are a force to be reckoned with at this competition,” says C.T. Lin, the professor of mechanical engineering who advises the teams.
This year’s robot, named VADER, took first place in the design challenge and third place in the autonomous-navigation challenge and the joint architecture for unmanned systems challenge. It ceded the top spot to Oakland University, which hosts the event in Rochester, MI and bested Hosei University in Japan, which had tied with the CSUN team last year.
The IGV competition is cosponsored annually by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) and the U.S. Army’s Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center (TARDEC), as well as various companies and organizations. The 2014 team was made up of mechanical engineering students Daniel Valenzuela, Melissa Flores, Daniel Kim, Richard Gillberg, Margaret Goldman, Wonkyu Whan, Joseph Prince, Jesse Combs, Torrence Pineau, Denny Farias, William Pangestu, Jesse Campos, Chris Smith and Eric Espiritu; and electrical and computer engineering students Abou-Baker Kadmiry, Riel Palis, Qusai Qaneetah, Hassib Abi Rafeh, Ruben Berumen and Amandeep Brar.