FUSION Engineering Project 2021-22

Like many professional organizations at UCI, FUSION takes pride in providing experience and opportunities to eager students. We believe in Social support, Professionalism, Academia, Culture, and Engineering as pillars for our club. Each of these pillars are deeply embedded in our annual engineering projects. Since the beginning of this club, iterations of the club projects gained recognition for providing valuable experience and lessons for the participating students. This year, FUSION presents the 2021-2022 Engineering Project: Hungry Hungry Hippos.

Despite the nostalgic name, this project demands several disciplines of engineering, organization, and commuincation from each of the participating students. Three teams must create a robot that collects gold coins within a provided field both autonomously and through manual control. Not only will these teams build towards item recognition and retrieval, but must also plan against other competing teams as well as FUSION's own administrative team known as the Goldkeepers. With little design restrictions and a strong budget, this year-long project will test the strategies and abilities of upcoming engineers in a competitive manner.

Team 1 (Barkada)

Goal and Objectives:

The goal of this project is to design a robot that is capable of sorting coins, and dispensing coins into specific locations (one location for desired coins, another location for undesired coins). This robot should be able to achieve the above design objectives in an autonomous manner, and a controllable manner. It will also be competing against another coin collecting robot, and must collect and dispose of objects without harming the opposing robot. This project will also serve as a learning tool for all of its participants, providing an environment for project members to improve their knowledge of robotics and coding, and also allowing members to grow by improving their collaboration skills in problem solving and teamwork.

Team Name:

Our team name is Barkada, this idea comes from the english translation of "gang or clique". The meaning of barakada can give off either a positive/negative connotation but we would like to give both in a sense. We hope to give off a sinister persona to our competition as we have formulated a plan in which we might be seen as the bad guys. The other meaning is to show how dedicated we are as a team and to one another.

Sean Manilay smanilay@uci.edu
Dharren Ursua-Agbisit ursuaagd@uci.edu
Christien Garbada cgabarda@uci.edu
Elijah Grayda egrayda@uci.edu
Justin Lumabas jlumabas@uci.edu
James Yao-Smith jyaosmith@uci.edu
Alfredo Pascua pascuaat@uci.edu

Team 2 (Hangry Hangry Hedgehogs)

Goal and Objectives:

With this project, our team's goal is to challenge ourselves with the development of a robot that can not only be effectively functional but beneficial to today's society. Within this project, we will develop and apply our skills, research methods and our engineering backgrounds in order to create the best robot of our ability. We will use our robot to compete against the other teams in FUSIONCon, where we hope to score the most points, ultimately winning the competition.

Team Name:

Our team name is the Hangry Hangry Hedgehogs. Our name originates from the idea of the childhood board game, Hungry Hungry Hippos, but with our own little spin. We decided to stick with something similar as our robot focuses on the functionality of item retrieval, both autonomously and human controlled. Additionally we went with the animal the hedgehog, similar to the video game character Sonic the Hedgehog. In video games, Sonic often goes through levels, collects rings, and avoids enemies, which is easily applicable to the concept of our competition. Our competition is based on collecting coins and returning them to a goal all while avoiding obstacles and the GFU robots.

Team Contact(s):

Gianna Calderon gtcalder@uci.edu
Ariel Mercado arielcm@uci.edu
Marc Cabral mpcabral@uci.edu
Frances Legaspi fmlegasp@uci.edu
Ethan Pugay epugay@uci.edu
Daniel Solis solisdl@uci.edu

Team 3 (MegaTuron)

Goal and Objectives:

Our team's goal first and foremost is to develop technical skills and logistical habits throughout the course of project that will aid us in future job prospects. Our team is divided into three specialized units- mechanical, control, and electrical- and we plan to apply the knowledge and skills learned in engineering classes and workshops to complete the robot in an efficient and organized manner. We aim to improve our project managing skills by rendevouzing for weekly meetings to communicate with one another the progress in our respective roles, solve any issues pertaining the design and implementation of the robot, and just overall try to properly balance the hectic college life with academic projects.

Our second goal is to win. We intend to make this happen by creating a robust robot capable of scooping multiple coins at a time, and holding on to them in a storage compartment. This eliminates the time needed to traverse back and forth between the goal and the pool, so it can go right back to collecting. While this may cause the robot to move slower, we will utilize that to our advantage because it gives our robot time to sense incoming obstacles, such as the defense units built by the illustrious engineering directors of this years FUSION project, informing our robot to redirect its course to avoid any competition-ending collisions.

Team Name:

Our team name is MegaTuron. Megatron is a popular fictional robot on the antagonist side of the Transformers movie franchise. Our team name is a pun of this character because we are building a robot that wants to be the best. Since the project is held in a Filipino and engineering club, we also wanted our team name to have a hint of the culture. Turon is a Filipino snack that consists of a banana wrapped in a spring roll wrapper covered with brown sugar. Turon was perfectly relatable to both the culture and the food aspect of the Hungry Hungry Hippos project.

Team Contact(s):

Joey Balardeta, jbalarde@uci.edu
Ralph Vhency Soria, rvsoria@uci.edu
Devang Taneja, tanejad@uci.edu
John David Libramonte, jlibramo@uci.edu
Margallo Malit, malitm@uci.edu
Marvin Mata, mjmata@uci.edu

Team Goldkeepers

Goal and Objectives:

The goal of the GFU robot is to create a hindrance for the other teams when trying to score gold coins. The GFU will be designed as a body lock robot with a tank wheel based drive system. Due to the uniqueness of this design and the specificity of the goal, there is a lack of documentation on such a kind of robot. The primary goal of the team is to solidify their skills in the overall engineering process beginning from the design of the robot to its actual implementation. Specifically, the team members hope to improve their skills in SolidWorks by running preliminary testing on the robot. Team members also hope to improve their programming skills in Python in order to program the robot’s movement. Finally, being the administrative team, the team members hope to provide assistance for the other teams along the way while simultaneously applying their own knowledge towards building the GFU robot.

Being a part of the admin team is a special situation regarding the engineering project; we are not competing, but are designing robots that act with the competition. Throughout the course of building, our goal is to create robots that challenge participating students using our methods of “body blocking.” In the long run, our team is not focused on winning or beating other robots, but to provide an extra obstacle for teams to overcome. We, as a team, must work hard to provide a strong engineering experience for teams while challenging ourselves through the art of robotics.

Team Name:

Our team name is Goldkeeper. A goalkeeper in soccer is the player that prevents the other team from scoring on their goal. The team arrived at the name by changing the “goal” in goalkeeper to “gold” to create a clever play-on-word or pun. When said out loud, Goalkeeper sounds just like the word goalkeeper. This also aligns with the objective of the GFU robot, preventing the other team from scoring the gold.

Team Contact(s):