This past Earth Day Weekend, a delegation of seven ASME UD students braved the seemingly never-ending rain in Tennessee to represent the University of Delaware at the 1st annual ASME Engineering Festival East! We drove hard through the night, and toiled even harder the next to get our Henbot in shape for the Robot Pentathlon Student Design Competition against 80 other registered teams from around the country.
The next day, it was showtime (and yet more rain). The Henbot team then carried their creation into battle in the gym to size up their competition and check in…
Besides the competitions side of things, ASME E-Fest is unique in that it combined the academic elements of a conference with the competitive aspects of build events. In addition to the robots competitors and our faculty advisor judging the competition, we also had several students present research at the Old Guard poster session. These members also attended interesting talks on the future of additive manufacturing given by Local Motors representatives and Oak Ridge National Laboratory Scientist, in addition to learning several new CAD software packages through informative seminars. Not to mention, there were two cool female engineer guest speakers presenting to a full house at lunch and dinner on Saturday.
After such a jam-packed Saturday of seminars and competitions, we decided to take it a little easier and relax a little. Valuable networking ensured for some, others slept in as they needed. Everyone went hiking to great views at Fall Creek Falls in Spencer, Tennessee and latter explored Luray Caverns on the way back home. This was a great capstone ending to such an awesome trip. Thank you to everyone who came with us, and especially to those who organized this awesome event to make it all possible!
