COD Robotics Team Places in Top Ten at UIUC Robotics Competition

The College of DuPage Robotics Team, an offshoot of the College’s Engineering and Technology Club, had an impressive top-ten finish and was the only team from a two-year school to compete in the 31st annual Midwestern Robotics Design Competition (MRDC).

View a video of the competition.

The Midwestern Robotics Design Competition is an annual robotics competition held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where student teams from across the Midwest design and build competitive robots. Each year, a new game objective is created that tests the teams in terms of creative design and robot functionality and fosters new designs and innovation. The goal of the competition is to promote engineering disciplines and provide students a chance to demonstrate their technical abilities and creativity while applying knowledge learned in engineering courses.

This year’s team included Tomas Bindokas (Westmont), Issael Cordoba (Naperville), Chintan Dave (Carol Stream), Ojas DhiYogi (Naperville), John Dueschle (Lemont), Ryan Fase (Lemont), Alexandra Manaves (Willow Springs), Octavio Munoz (Glendale Heights), Edward Pittsford (Wheaton), Adam Popper (Lemont), Ashhud Rajput (Naperville), Evan Ripperger (Bensenville), Stephen Romero (Countryside), Kenneth Segovia (Hanover Park), and Bryce Williams (Aurora).

Ripperger, the team’s head of mechanics, said he is pleased with the team’s performance at the competition.

“The results of the competition were very positive in my eyes,” he said. “For the first time in COD's history of attending the competition, every robot we brought was successfully able to accomplish at least one of the challenges. This took huge effort from all of our team members, old and new.”