Alawi Assaggaf can recall walking into the Ottawa regional competition of the Canadian National Robot Games this past August and immediately seeing a problem in the maze-solving challenge category – the category Carleton’s “Uber Epics” were about to compete in.
“At the end of the maze, there was a ‘loop’,” he said. “And the robots would get stuck in it. We quickly had to pull out our laptops, 10 minutes before competing, and plant a new code to overcome this new challenge.”
Assaggaf, a fourth-year electrical engineering student and current president of the Carleton University Robotics Club, co-founded the club two years ago because of his desire to have a better understanding of robotics. He said the club is a great place to share knowledge, improve robot-engineering skills and gain different perspectives on the building of robots.
This past summer, the robotics club won second place in the Ottawa regional competition of the Canadian National Robotics Games maze-solving challenge. The team plans to compete again in Ottawa this summer with a robot named “Wall-E.”
Members have also entered a competition called CanSat, sponsored in part by NASA and the American Astronautical society, where university and college students design and build a “space-type system,” from the concept stage through the testing of an actual prototype, according to the CanSat website.
Carleton’s robotics club was founded in the fall of 2009 by about six or seven engineering students, Assaggaf said, with the purpose of bringing different engineering fields together outside the classroom and to get students involved with robotics.
A few Carleton engineering professors initially sparked the idea of a robotics club, he said. They invited around 30 to 40 students to meet and discuss the founding of the club. Assaggaf was one of those students.
“It’s a beautiful environment to both teach and learn,” he said of the club. “It was such a great feeling to be part of this initiative and part of the initializing of the club, specifically seeing its results today in the engineering student body.”
The executives of the club meet biweekly, while general membership meetings are held about once a month.
At executive meetings, they focus on planning upcoming events, improving the club and administration details, such as updating the club’s website, incorporating new projects into the club and distributing club tasks.
At general meetings, the executives give a brief summary of the club’s progress before opening the floor for membership discussion — usually on the topic of taking on new project ideas.
“The meetings are a good chance to bring everyone together,” Assaggaf said. “To find out about new projects, a chance for the project manager to give a presentation about their project [to the rest of the club].”
Assaggaf’s role as president of the club includes overseeing the progress of different projects and ensuring the learning and sharing of skill sets amongst its membership. In the future, he’d like to see the structure of the club become more concrete, he said.
“Since it’s something new, there are a lot of challenges we’re faced with . . . When things [become] more organized and more concrete, it will be easier to pass on information and knowledge to new members. It will also be easier to apply [information and knowledge] to new projects in the future,” Assaggaf said.
He would like to make the club more known and available to all students on campus, he added.
“There are lots of people who are interested in [the field of robotics],” he said, “but they have an idea that the club is just for engineers. [Carleton’s club] is not specifically for engineering students. It’s open for anyone to join.”
In the future, the robotics club would like to host a competition with other universities’ robotics clubs, Assaggaf said, including the University of Ottawa, McGill, Concordia and Queen’s, to name a few.
“It’s an idea, but it’s difficult to come together. With the progress of the club, there is definitely a chance for the new executives to do it in the future.”
