On the 7th February the University of Surrey’s Electronics & Amateur Radio Society (EARS) hosted its 2024 ScraphEEp Challenge robot building competition. This year, teams of contestants ranging from first year students all the way up to postgraduates and staff, had just three hours to design and build functioning robots using only materials from our large scrap pile in order to complete the obstacle course.
After briefly running through the rules, the three-hour countdown was started, and teams immediately got to tearing apart the scrap pile for useful components. During the event it was great to see the ingenuity of the teams coming up with ideas that we never would’ve thought of. For example, “Team Surtes”, the university’s Formula Student society, stripped apart an old 3D printer to extract bearings to ensure that their robot rolled smoothly. Additionally, team “University Challenged” glued the rubber belts from the 3D printer to plastic bottle lids in order to make grippy wheels for their robot.
“This was the first ScraphEEp since the pandemic and the first that the current EARS committee had organised together. With a total of 10 teams and over 50 people entering, we are very happy with how the event went”, said Douglas, EARS Publicity Officer.
The obstacle course consisted of eight tasks for the team’s robots to complete. The first was a dance floor, illuminated by disco lights, where a maximum of fifteen points could be awarded for the robot’s dance. After 15 seconds the lights go green and the robots must storm down the four metre drag strip as fast as possible, breaking and taking a hard left at the end before falling off the edge. The robots then had to traverse the uneven remnants of the scrap pile with plenty of wires to get caught on. It was then onto the next task where the robots had to carefully cross the narrow bridge onto the next bench. Here the robots encountered the spinner where they would have to climb on and off the spinning platform without falling into the void. Immediately after was the tight cornered maze, testing the robots’ moveability to the limits. If any robots made it this far then they faced the spinning prongs that caught the robots and dumped them onto the floor. This proved one of the hardest obstacles for the team’s robots to complete. And the grand finale was the jump or plank where teams could gain an additional 15 points for getting their robot to jump as far as possible, with an extra 6 bonus points if it survived the fall.
“On Wednesday some members took part in ScraphEEp where they had the opportunity to design and build a robot which of course was made to look like a formula student car and although it may not have gone in a straight line, the team had great fun taking part in this event!” – Team Surtes, Surrey Formula Student
Our society’s publicity team were also filming the event and will be producing a full-length documentary, the trailer of which can be found on our YouTube channel.
For more information about the University of Surrey’s Electronics & Amateur Radio Society and how to get involved, check out our links on our Linktree.