Background Information

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, 2005. 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.

How Our Sofware Fits

Our goal is to help the competition run smoother for the judges, the competing teams, and the audience. Our focus is on the following tasks:
  • Enhance the judging capability from simple paper-pencil to wireless PDAs, allowing the judges to roam anywhere around the arena and effortlessly score the match.
  • Save the scores of each match in a secure database, which can be accessed at a future time.
  • Allow everyone to view the current match status, including score, time, and team information, all in real-time on a large screen viewable througout the gym.
  • Allow everyone to view the competition schedule, including match schedules and current score leaders, in real-time on a large screen viewable throughout the gym.
  • Dynamically create round schedules to form matches that fit the proper guidelines (i.e. teams compete against similarly ranked teams, teams gets proper time between its matches, etc).

Interested?

Check out the Developer's Guide, visit the JSDC homepage, or email one of the project admins to see how you can get involved!