The University of Illinois and Advanced Micro Devices proudly present the 18th annual AMD Jerry Sanders Creative Design Competition, held during Engineering Open House on March 11th and 12th. The contest is sponsored by Advanced Micro Devices and held in honor of W.J. "Jerry" Sanders, an alumnus of the University of Illinois. Advanced Micro Devices endorses this contest to inspire excellence in engineering.
Each year, engineering students of all disciplines build robots to achieve predefined objectives and compete for more than $5,000 in prizes. This year's objective requires robots to deliver their team's plastic balls to other teams' bases to score points, while keeping their own base clear to prevent other teams from scoring.
The competition promotes engineering disciplines and offers students a chance to demonstrate their technical abilities and creativity while applying knowledge learned in engineering courses. Overall, the design competition presents a well-rounded multi-disciplinary engineering challenge to future engineers.
March 1, 2005 - Update two for the day, pictures of the bases and bridge have been added to the Course Info page.
March 1, 2005 - The rules page has been updated and finalized. (Note: despite the green-on-black browser display, the rules are printer-friendly.) Also, Checkpoint 3 has been pushed to this Friday, March 4. As this is one week before the competition, your robots should be very nearly fully functional; just update us on your status, as with checkpoint 2.
February 13, 2005 - A picture of the revised corner base layout is now available on the Course Info page.
January 31, 2005 - Guidelines for Checkpoint 2 have been posted, and are accessible here and from the calendar page.
January 27, 2005 - The date for the second Q&A session has been set at Monday, January 31st at 7:00 pm in 165 Everitt Lab. We'll be there for an hour and twenty minutes to accomodate those with 7:00 conflicts, and once again, we will be signed on to AIM as JSDCDirector for those of you not at UIUC.
November 29, 2004 - Detailed requirements for Checkpoint 1 have been posted, and are accessible here and from the calendar page.
November 8, 2004 - The first Q&A session will be held on Thursday, November 11th at 8pm in 165 Everitt Lab. We will be there until at least 9:20 for those of you with 8:00 conflicts. Additionally, we will be signed on to AOL Instant Messenger on the screen name JSDCDirector for those of you not on the UIUC campus.
November 5, 2004 - Registration is now up, so everyone can start registering their teams for the competition. The registration deadline has been pushed back a week to Thursday, November 18th. Also, we will be having our first Q&A session next week, tentatively scheduled for Thursday, November 11 at 8pm (location TBA). More info on Monday.
November 2, 2004 - Lots of updates have been put up under the course link, the rules link and the objective. I'm waiting for a final delivery date on the balls and then I will schedule a meeting based on that date. Please read over the documentation and let us know any concerns, problems, or raves. Thanks!
October 20, 2004 - The 2004 video has at last been finished. It's available on the multimedia page.
October 4, 2004 - The discussion group at Yahoo.com is being retired. For now, we have an email list set up on the UIUC Engineering Council server; everyone would do well to subscribe to it here. Note that some email providers, such as Hotmail.com, may initially sort messeges from the mail list as junk, so keep an eye on your junk mail for a few days after subscribing. The good news, though, is that since only members can post messeges to the group, it should be fairly spam-proof.
August 31, 2004 - I've begun reworking the site for the 2005 competition. Several pages are not yet finished. I'll post another update when they are.