ECU robotics team wins national competition
If robots are indeed going to take over the world someday, a group of East Carolina University students may just be responsible.
ECU’s robotics team won the Association of Technology, Management and Applied Engineering national student robot competition in Memphis, Tennessee. The victory comes after consecutive second-place finishes in 2023 and 2024.
“Ecstatic — that’s the best way I can put it. I’m just over the moon happy,” Heath Faircloth, president of ECU’s ATMAE robotics team, said of the victory. “I’ve been here for three years, so getting two second places in a row, I was really hungry to bring the team to that first-place win. Especially with this being my last year in robotics because I’m graduating soon, it’s a really satisfying feeling to know that I’m ending with a national championship.”
ECU has finished no worse than third in the national competition since winning it in 2019, a mark of consistency that stems from the long hours the students put in outside of their normal classes and labs.
“We had people pulling all-nighters working on this. We had people working three days straight,” Faircloth said.
Work on the robot began in the spring and continued through the summer.
“There was a lot of work designing a system that all had to work independently,” said Alec Lozano, a junior computer science major from Greenville who led the computer programming team. “Before we wrote any code, there was a lot of planning over the summer and developing a layout of what the system would potentially look like and how it would interact.”
Once the fall semester started, the team met for several hours twice per week as they began to build a robot that had to identify different colored balls, sort them, move around a course, avoid objects in its path and then hit a bull’s-eye for bonus points.
“The objective was way more demanding than the previous competitions,” said Faircloth, a senior engineering major from Roseboro with concentrations in electrical and mechanical engineering. “We had more stuff that we had to do in the competition, so we had to fit more systems on the robot. The robot had to have more functionality than any other robot that I’ve ever helped build.”
The required size of the robot — not to exceed a 15-inch by 15-inch box — presented challenges for the fabrication team led by Caleb Gay, a Greenville industrial technology senior with a concentration in mechanical design.
“That’s not very big,” he said.
Amy Frank honored
Amy Frank, director of community college and military outreach, and a computer-aided design instructor in the College of Engineering and Technology, received the Charles Keith Award during the ATMAE Annual Conference. The award recognizes exceptional, long-term service to ATMAE, the student division, and the profession. Frank is the co-faculty advisor for ECU’s ATMAE student organization.
Amy Frank stands with the Charles W. Keith Award. (Photo by Ken Buday)
Gay said he took particular pleasure in seeing his team members succeed.
“The thing I enjoyed the most was watching the individuals of the team design something and build something or print something and have it come to life and work,” he said. “You watch that person get it. They understand. You watch someone design a part and they’re excited to see it work. That’s what gets me ticking, seeing those guys build something and being proud of it.”
Beyond capturing the overall title, ECU also won several categories in the competition, placing first in mechanical/manufacturing design, first in electrical controls design and first in technical poster. Those awards are based on performance and required documentation that includes the design and materials used to create the robot.
“We have to document everything we’re doing,” Faircloth said. “The competition is not just about the robot. If you put all of your effort into the robot and let the documentation slip or the presentation slip, then that can really hurt you in the long run because it all plays a factor in who gets first place, not just how your robot did.”
Those types of soft skills combine with technical experience to help team members when they graduate and go searching for jobs.
“It definitely helps if I ever get into a leadership role managing a group of developers,” Lozano said. “On the technical side, it really helped with a lot of computer science fundamentals. There was a lot of computer networking going on, and we were using AI to align the robot autonomously. We got to implement a lot of fundamental techniques that I will use in the market.”
Other members of the robotics team include: Jay Ahmed; Aiden Altman; Michael Campbell; Pi Tu Chau; Jackson Fitch; Anthony Galardi; Will Handfield; Caitlin Kim; Yasmin Mata-Delgado; Joshua Nash; Kevin Perez-Baltazar; Tyler Rashap; Hope Wesner; and Colby Whisnant. Bill McClung and Amy Frank, instructors in the Department of Technology Systems, serve as advisors for the group.
“The whole team deserves the credit. It was truly a team effort,” Faircloth said. “Everybody had a critical role. If any one person who was on the team wasn’t on this team, it would have made it so much harder.”
And as for defending the championship next year?
“We’re going to keep on rocking and rolling like we have been — full speed ahead,” Gay said.