On Saturday, April 12 the Brown University chapter of IEEE hosted the third annual Brown Robotics Olympiad (BRO) at Barus and Holley. The BRO is an intercollegiate, micro-mouse style robotics competition. Students form teams of 3-8 people and, over the course of an academic year, design and construct a robot able to autonomously navigate and solve a 16-by-16 square maze. This year, four Brown teams competed against eight teams from six other schools, including Harvard, Princeton and Yale in the full-day competition.
Two Brown teams finished first and second. Team Required, which included Jen Cardona '15, Miles Eldon '15, Erick Munoz '17, and Haeri Yoon '15,won the competition with 105 cells traversed, while 5 Blind Mice, which included Kei Nishimura-Gasparian '16, Lila Rodgers '16, Sammy Straus '16, Alison Su '16, and Jack Wilson '16, finished second with 46 cells traversed. Princeton's Torque Team came in third with 21 cells traversed. Lehigh University won the design competition.
"It was a great day for all the teams, and everyone did an admirable job," said Margaret Baxter '14, President of IEEE at Brown.
The competition was sponsored by Microsoft and Boyle Fredrickson.