Engineering the Future

Five teams from the future of mechanical engineering met on the playing fields of Caltech’s Beckman Lawn Thursday for the 38th annual ME 72 Engineering Design Competition presented by the school’s Mechanical Engineering department.

The name, “ME72” represents “Engineering Design Laboratory,” which is the course that the students are studying and completing.

The event pits engineering teams against each other with a mission of designing and building two mobile robots operated by remote control that would assist a “shooter robot” in loading and firing racquet balls at a set of targets at opposite ends of the playing field. The robots would also be traversing an obstacle course set up to earn extra points for their respective teams.

Each team’s mission was to earn the most points and use extra points to maximize their score before time runs out.

The challenge is essentially the final exam for mechanical engineering students, who began planning for the big event back in October.

“They want to win, of course, but in the end, this is a wonderful opportunity for them to go through a robust design build, fabrications, tests, fail, succeed scenario, and they learn innumerable lessons from all of that,” said Mechanical Engineering instructor/Caltech alum Mike Mello (phD, ‘12), who has been leading the class and challenge for nine years.

“They make everything with their hands from the fabrication to the building to the coding to the assembly,” he said. ‘And the idea is that they go through everything together and they go through the challenge that simulate the challenge that they face in the real world in private industry.

Six teams—Candace, Mech E Wednesdays, Prickly Purple Pineapples, [Redacted], and Squeezable & Bouncy—competed in the challenge this year, which was won by the “Mech E Wednesdays” team of Matticus Brown, Sean Chang, Nicolas Jimenez-Lozano, Jordan Ostby, Jules Penot, and Luke Phillipps.

“There are legions of students out there who have taken this course, and they think fondly of it,” said Mello, during the competition. “They write back to me to tell how it helped them in their first interview, and helped them be a more-seasoned entry-level engineer.”