Students Win Engineering Contest Building Space Rock Retriever
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 6, 1999
Joe Wills
530-898-4143
Students Win Engineering Contest Building Space Rock Retriever
Two California State University, Chico students won the American Society of Mechanical Engineer’s 1999 Regional Student Design Competition in San Jose March 26-28 with a rock-retrieving extraterrestrial vehicle.
Two other teams from CSU, Chico also finished in the top five among the 18 teams participating. UC Santa Barbara, Santa Clara University and San Jose State were among the other schools represented in the competition.
The winning CSU, Chico students, seniors Kevin Looney and Michael Walker, qualify for the national design competition in Nashville in January.
The teams were required to design and build a radio-controlled vehicle similar to “Sojourner,” which NASA used to test rocks on Mars. The student-built vehicles had to retrieve a rock, avoid a maze of barriers and deposit the rock in a target area. The vehicles were graded according to weight, speed and accuracy.
Two years ago, CSU, Chico hosted the Regional Student Conference of the ASME, and one of its student teams came in first in that competition as well. Looney and then-senior Mike Davis teamed up and won with their machine that moved two ping pong balls and a golf ball from a starting point into a box.
Students typically work half a year on a project for the design competition. Looney and Walker built their rock-retrieval vehicle as their required senior project.
The other CSU, Chico student teams in the design competition were Nathan Drury and Pete Andreotti, who came in fourth, and Scott Norris and Phil Headley, who placed fifth.
Drury also came in third in the ASME’s Poster Competition. His poster title was “Telerobotics.”
The winning rock-retrieval vehicle will be demonstrated by its student builders at 9 a.m. Thursday, April 8, Langdon Engineering Center, Room 122.
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