A team of students from ESIGELEC came 10th in the « Mission on Mars 2015 » Challenge organised by MathWorks. Selected from 12 teams during the qualifying round, they took part in the final, which was held in Lyon from 1 to 3 July 2015.

The ESIGELEC team comprised one girl and three boys, all four were international students; from the various training programmes: Junyu Chen (1st A Engineering Programme), Dingjie Ma (1st A Engineering Programme), Wen Yang (Preparatory Integrated International Programme) and Yuan Liao (a young EES Master's graduate).

The « Mission to Mars » Challenge was about optimising the MATLAB and Simulink algorithms used by a robot provided to teams, the Rover, in order to accomplish an exploration mission. The 3D printed Rover is made of Arduino boards and a Raspberry Pi. During this final, students had to programme the Rover so that it could move in a 3 m² arena and go to different places of the set, while avoiding obstacles.

" In the very beginning, we had huge problems when we integrated the program in the robot because it did not behave in quite the same way as when we had programmed it", explained the young people. "The force that was needed to start the robot was much greater than expected and it was sliding on its axes when turning. "

The teams present during this final mainly comprised robotics engineers and researchers. The ESIGELEC team had to contend with tenth place, to their great regret: "I am sure that we could have finished in the first four with our algorithm if we had had time to complete the changes in the 3 hours allocated," says Yang Wen, the young woman on the team. She added: "I hope that ESIGELEC will get better results in future years. We are willing to give advice to students who want to take part in this competition next year."

Contact : Wen YANG, yang.wen@orange.fr