UMaine Engineering Hosts Robot Competition and Conference
Contact: Ali Abedi (207) 581-2231; David Munson (207) 581-3777
ORONO, Maine – A high-tech collection of robotic super-mice will come together on the UMaine campus April 29, ready to pit the engineering and programming skills of some of the country’s brightest young minds against one another in the 2006 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Student Conference and Micro-mouse Competition.
More than 150 participants from across the Northeast have already registered for this year’s event, which boasts the largest attendance ever for the competition. This is the first time in more than 50 years of IEEE membership that UMaine has hosted the event, which is typically held on larger campuses in New York and Massachusetts.
“We worked very hard to get the conference here this year. We have a great school, but people don’t really know about the excellent facilities that we have here,” said UMaine Electrical and Computer Engineering professor and IEEE Maine Communications/Computer Society Chair Ali Abedi. “Having the conference here will provide some good publicity for IEEE and for UMaine as well. Its a win-win situation.”
Utilizing widespread support for the event both on and off campus, Abedi was able to raise enough money to pay for travel, lodging, and meals for every participant, as well as boost the prize money for the top three competitors in each category.
Open to undergraduates in engineering programs across the Northeast, the competition is divided into a more theoretical written competition and a hands-on challenge where students must build an intelligent robotic mouse. Utilizing environmental sensors and artificial intelligence programming, the mouse must find the shortest way to the center of an elaborate maze and back without any outside assistance from its creators.
Abedi hopes that the conference and its associated facility tours and campus activities will convey the strengths of UMaine’s engineering facilities and faculty to the undergraduate competitors and reinforce the college’s reputation as a top choice for graduate study in engineering. IEEE is the largest professional organization in the world, boasting more than 400,000 members worldwide. More than 20 UMaine students belong to the UMaine chapter.