Momentum - The Magazine for Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering Vol. 2 No. 1 | Page 12

STORY BY ROSAIRE BUSHEY & ERICA CORDER MECHANICAL ENGINEERING COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING
PHOTOS BY ERICA CORDER

MBZIRC

Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge

Virginia Tech answers call in $ 5M autonomous robotics challenge

The Team - Virginia Tech
Tomonari Furukawa - Professor , ME Karim Abdelatty , PhD student , ME Tamer Attia , PhD student , ME Jonathan Hodges , PhD student , ME Haseeb Chaudhry , PhD student , ME Jason Mickey Cowden , MS student , ECE Luan Doan , MS student , ME Chang Koo Kang , MS student , AOE Orson Lin , MS student , ME Urvi Desai , MS student , ECE David Jensen , Junior , ISE Yazhe Hu , PhD student , ME Vihan Talur , MS student , ECE Spencer Leake , Senior , ME Nestor Folta , Junior , ME Tom Ehrenzeller , MS student , ME
University of Technology , Sydney Janindu Arukgoda , MS student Gamini Dissanayake , Professor , ME
Ravindra Ranasinghe , Senior Research Fellow
Lakshitha Dantanaraya , Postdoctoral Fellow
Jensen Hughes Brian Lattimer , VP of Research & Development
Alan Lattimer , Sr . software engineer
Alumni Spouses , and VT alumni , Adam Rossi ( CE ) and Laila Rossi ( Psychology ) have contributed to the team on behalf of their venture capital and private equity company , Indie .
A team of students and researchers at Virginia Tech is entering a $ 5 million international competition in March 2017 that aims to catalyze the development of cutting-edge , autonomous robotics .
When the call went out for participants for the Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge in 2015 , 143 teams from around the world answered . Virginia Tech ’ s Team VICTOR , housed in the Wendy and Norris E . Mitchell ’ 58 Robotics Laboratory , is one of 25 teams remaining after two preliminary rounds of competition . The team of undergraduate and graduate students is one of 15 to be sponsored by Khalifa University , the competition organizer . Only two other U . S . -based teams , Georgia Tech and Carnegie Mellon University , were awarded sponsorships from the $ 3 million fund .
The team will compete for the additional $ 2 million available through a series of challenges to be held in the United Arab Emirates on March 16-18 .
“ We ’ ve done very well through the two progress report stages ,” said Tomonari Furukawa , professor of mechanical engineering and advisor to Team VICTOR . “ Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi have been very gracious and put together a challenge that is exciting from both a design and intellectual challenge standpoint .”
The competition will feature four separate challenges using different types of autonomous vehicles .
For the first challenge , teams must deploy a drone to autonomously locate and land on the back of a moving truck . The second challenge will use a land vehicle with an arm that must , without human intervention : traverse a
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