Warman project overview and analysis

Warman Project is the budding Australian student engineer's wet dream come true. It's a competition between like-minded Australian university students in a stunning display of engineering prowess. The students participate in a year-long design and build competition that tests their knowledge and acumen regarding how to design, build, and test unmanned robotic devices that meet a series of standards and objectives. Once they have completed the project, they finally compete against other similar projects The 2011 competition follows on the heels of the previous yearly projects that sought the design of unmanned robotic devices to meet specific guidelines as per the contest rules and regulations.

The 2011 version; titled Pick-and-Place (PnP), requires a team of student engineers to design and build a robotic prototype that is sufficiently nimble and sturdy enough to pick up spheres and transport them to another location in an efficient and timely manner. The spheres are placed on three separate levels; the robotic machine must be able to pick them up and deliver them from any/all three levels.

The competition is open to university students at a number of participating higher education institutions across Australia. Each university provides the opportunity for engineering students to complete a design/build/test project based on the stated requirements of the Warman project. The students form teams to complete the project, then compete against other teams in a university-wide competition. The winner is chosen based on the strict requirements of the project including the design specifications, the performance of the robotic machine and the timing. The winning team is then entered into the national tournament to compete against teams from other colleges and universities.

The Warman Project seeks to have engineering students design, build and test unmanned robotic devises based on design cycles. It offers a chance to take an idea and transform it into reality in a realistic, yet inexpensive method of developing engineering ideas. It also gives many of the students a taste of reality that they might not desire to have; often times designing and building a robotic device to accomplish certain goals and objectives is much more difficult than what is anticipated by many of the students; this is true not only on the university level, but on the national competition level as well.