FIRST-like Programs at the College Level

[JamesCH95]

Originally Posted by Chadfrom308

I am doing formula SAE. Though it's not robotics, it is similar in the sense that you have to make a car and program sensors and optimize things. And I go and cost visit my old team whenever I can

Originally Posted by apalrd

Highly recommended:

Formula SAE - Design and engineering competition, to build an open-wheel performance race car, in every sense. Everything *must* be optimized, it takes the whole year or more to design and build the vehicle. Vehicle design must balance 'ideal' vehicle dynamics characteristics with stiffness, weight, power, and packaging, with a mix of steel space-frame and carbon fiber monocoque chassis designs and 4-stroke motorbike engines. Rather insane power/weight ratios (e.g. 0.37 kw/kg is not unusual).

http://students.sae.org/cds/formulaseries/about.htm

Baja SAE - Off-roading competition, focused on balancing performance with durability. Heavy durability aspect, the over 80% of the vehicles will not finish the endurance, many completely roll over, and all return entirely covered in mud.

http://students.sae.org/cds/bajasae/about.htm

If you're at a school cold enough to get a lot of snow, you might have Clean Snowmobile Challenge. This is primarily a powertrain development competition. The goals here are noise, fuel economy, and emissions. IMHO, the snowmobile competition is the most personal, also the longest, at 6 days, but with only about 18 teams total there's a lot of time to talk to sponsors and event organizers directly.
http://students.sae.org/cds/snowmobile/about.htm


For anyone who says they need a totally new challenge every year, I am currently several months into designing and testing a completely new powertrain package, re-writing all of the control strategy for a newer, faster controller (80mhz PowerPC, now with 64K RAM, less than half the weight, higher timing accuracy), and working with the rules committee to allow electronic throttle control in a sane way. Last year, our (almost entirely new) team switched to a different wheel size and tire compound and completely re-designed the chassis and suspension concept. There aren't rules changes to drive innovation, but complete concept changes and improvements driven by what competitors have done, continually 'raising the bar'.

I did FSAE in college. If you (OP) don't think there's a spot for EEs on an FSAE (or other automotive team) you're dead wrong. On our 2009 car we had a completely custom power distribution board designed and populated by one or two students. Think FRC PD board, but considerably more sophisticated: it had various power control relays, fuses, and a few CAN-bus controlled features. We also had a 100% custom CAN-bus dashboard that had a configurable F1-style tach light, configurable sensor readouts, a display screen, and other CAN-bus driven features. We attempted, but didn't implement, closed-loop traction control, which is simply chock full of EE elements. This is just scratching the surface of what EE-related things are possible in an SAE program.

A big benefit of any SAE program is that your research and experiments can be publishable and you get authorship as an undergraduate in a straight-forward manor.

I have been told by certain member(s) on CD that they 'don't respect FSAE.' Don't be fooled into thinking that because the design space is heavily worked-over that there isn't room for innovation or that there isn't challenging work to do. Furthermore, if you thought you worked hard on FRC during build season, brace yourself for a whole order of magnitude larger effort to get an FSAE or BajaSAE car ready!