UOIT Engineering students impress on provincial stage

Three days in an intense competitive setting. Six hours of working against the clock, feverishly developing the best robot prototype possible. Welcome to the Ontario Engineering Competition (OEC).

The annual OEC brings together the province’s most talented engineering students to do battle in an Olympiad of engineering challenges. Making your mark at this level of engineering involves putting your innovation skills to the ultimate test. And only a handful get to bring home any hardware.

Held in late January at the University of Waterloo, OEC 2016 saw the Senior Design Team representing the University of Ontario Institute of Technology’s (UOIT) Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science emerge with a hard-earned third-place trophy.

UOIT Senior Design Team members:

• Jean-Paul Basacchi (Mechanical Engineering, fourth year)
• Madison Bratina (Mechatronics Engineering, third year)
• Jonathon Buisman (Mechanical Engineering, fourth year)
• Shivang Rai (Manufacturing Engineering, third year) 

“It was an incredible experience for all of us to participate at OEC and we are very proud to have brought a trophy back home to UOIT,” says Jean-Paul Basacchi. “Only a razor-thin margin kept us from gaining second place, which would have qualified us for the national competition. Hopefully next year’s team will make that happen.”

At OEC, all teams get just six hours from the time they receive their design challenge to the moment their prototype and presentation need to be ready. UOIT’s challenge was to produce a fully functional shape-shifting robot prototype capable of turning on a light switch and then moving past a series of walls within a confined space. The robot cannot touch any of the walls.

“We had to quickly decide on our tactics to determine how to program it and where to position the robot’s arms,” explains Madison Bratina. “At UOIT, we are very familiar with 3D computer-aided design (CAD) programming and motion simulation. The judges were impressed with our ability to design such a complex prototype so quickly.”

“We all had key jobs during our demonstration as we nervously made the robot successfully carry out the task,” says Shivang Rai. “One thing that helped our design tremendously was using beads of glue from a glue gun. We noticed that the board was very slippery on the competition table and moved easily. The glue under our design increased the static friction from pushing contact points.” 

“Participating in OEC supports our engineering studies as it is a fun way to apply a majority of our knowledge from UOIT in a competition setting, to produce something that has infinite solutions,” says Jonathon Buisman.

“The Ontario Engineering Competition is an invaluable opportunity for our students to compete against some of the brightest engineering students from across the province and apply what they’ve learned in the classroom to solve real-world problems. We are proud of our 2016 OEC team for representing our university and our faculty with distinction.”
-Tarlochan Sidhu, PhD, Dean, UOIT Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science