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November 29, 2004 Vol. 75, no. 9F
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| The 2004 winning NATCAR
team: applied science Ph.D. candidate Donovan Lee (right), theoretical
physical chemistry Ph.D. candidate Josh Schrier (center), and EECS
junior Freddy Chang. The team built the fastest robot vehicle in
the Mechatronics Design Lab. “This is the best class to take
when you’re an undergraduate,” Lee says. |
Mechatronics
design team keeps eye on the NATCAR prize: fastest, not coolest car
On the first day of Mechatronics
Design Lab (EE 192) last January, applied science Ph.D. candidate Donovan
Lee turned to the guy next to him, and asked, “Do you want to win?”
“Yeah, I want to win,” said theoretical physical chemistry
Ph.D. candidate Josh Schrier.
Lee, an EECS alum (B.S. 2000), then turned to the guy sitting behind
him and asked him if he wanted to win.
“Yeah,” came the reply from EECS then-junior Freddy Chang.
“Okay, let’s be a team,” Lee remembers saying.
Over the next 12 weeks, Lee, Chang and Schrier joined forces on a single
mission. The design lab’s one project is to design a racing robot
vehicle that will follow an embedded wire over a curving and self-crossing
path at speeds greater than three meters per second. Speeds as in racing;
racing as in to win NATCAR, the ten-year-old competition held every
year in May sponsored by National Semiconductor, and featuring teams
from Stanford, UCLA, San Jose State, UC Davis, and other universities.
The fastest car wins.
Since it first began competing in 1997, Berkeley has won six of the
last eight competitions, says Professor Ron Fearing. In 2000, a Cal
team clocked the NATCAR record of 9.82 feet per second.
Lee’s team aimed high; the three not only wanted to win, but to
break the old Cal record. Chang optimized code; Schrier designed the
software; and Lee took care of the hardware. They had big ideas, but
a month before the competition, the three had an epiphany: the goal
was to win, not have the coolest car.
Schrier and Lee, being graduate students, wanted to keep regular 8-5
hours. Chang liked to work two or three days straight and disappear.
One day, after a particularly grueling marathon session, Chang collapsed
in an Evans lecture hall and slept through a full schedule of faculty
lectures, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
With Chang’s super efficient code and custom user interface for
on-the-fly tuning, the team was ready. When they arrived at NATCAR,
other teams were there already, standing around tuning their cars.
“It was really, really nerdy,” Lee says, laughing.
The team did something, then, that no one else did: “We assumed
the track at the competition would have evolving errors so we calibrated
to the actual track just before the race. Everyone else guessed.”
For five minutes, their car zipped around the track. At the end, its
fastest time came in: 25.75 seconds, an average of 9.76 feet per second.
Though they didn’t break the record, Lee, Schrier and Chang had
won.
For more information on
NATCAR, click on: http://www.ece.ucdavis.edu/natcar/index.html.
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