OU Team Wins First in Robotics Competition

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In June, engineering students at the University of Oklahoma won first place at the Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition (IGVC) Auto-Nav challenge in Rochester, Michigan.  

The students were part of OU’s Sooner Competitive Robotics team and they shared the excitement of winning the university’s first-ever IGVC competition. The Auto-Nav challenge entails a robot navigating a road course laid out in a parking lot, which involves staying in the lanes, avoiding traffic barrels and other obstacles, and pursuing GPS coordinates – all with no driver input.

The OU students designed, fabricated and programmed their robot, the Aluminum Whale, entirely from scratch over a two-year period. The robot gets its funny name from their first drive test, in which the robot’s low ground clearance caused it to get “beached” anytime it wasn’t on flat pavement, says OU engineering alumnus Kevin Robb, of Aledo, Texas.

Robb adds that with so many veteran teams competing, the OU team wasn’t sure they had a chance of winning. Competition included the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. 

“The IGVC was this extreme challenge that we accepted would take a few years to understand and succeed at, so I cannot overstate how proud and excited we all are,” said Robb who served as the team’s captain for the 2020-21 school year.

What allowed the OU team to perform well was their understanding of the features needed for the robot to win.

“Since we had a smaller team and it was our first time competing, we weren’t trying to do anything overly fancy just for the sake of it. Each person had control over their part of the project and understood it well enough to build all the necessary complexity into the lower levels. That way, we could switch out software or electronics modules on the fly, integrate new behaviors and do a lot of bug-fixing very quickly at the competition venue,” Robb said.

The group also won Rookie of the Year and second place in the Grand Award, an all-encompassing award where judges look at the team’s design report and presentation in addition to the robot’s performance. 

Each year, the IGVC competition features two separate events – the Auto-Nav and the Self-Drive. Organizers describe IGVC as a design experience at the cutting edge of engineering education and note that it encompasses the latest technologies impacting industrial development. The IGVC was established in 1993 by the U.S. Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command Ground Vehicle Systems Center and the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.

Founded in 2013, Sooner Competitive Robotics is the largest robotics organization and one of the largest competitive teams at the University of Oklahoma. They compete in robotics competitions across the nation encompassing a variety of unique challenges. OU engineering instructor Chad Davis serves as the team's adviser and can be contacted at weeb@ou.edu. Learn more about Sooner Competitive Robotics.  Additionally, check out the SCR interview on OU TV.

Photo at top: Engineering students from the University of Oklahoma took part in the Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition (IGVC) Auto-Nav challenge earlier this year. Team members included Kevin Robb, Noah Zemlin and Tyler Julian. 



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