USMA 1st at the ShepRobo Fest 2018

The Robotics Research Center (RRC) teamed up with LTC James Finocchiaro to develop a custom robot to compete in ShepRobo Fest 2018. LTC James Finocchiaro is currently completing his Advanced Civil Schooling as a graduate student at Columbia University and he will soon be USMA faculty. With assistance from the RRC, he designed and built a robot called Captain CURC that competed in the Mech-Warfare Robot contest. In this contest, Mechs are four legged walkers who shoot each other with airsoft rounds. It can be a violent display of force and the arena is physically blocked off from spectators. Six robots were present to compete in this competition, but only two were fully operational and able to enter the arena. Of the two, the joint Columbia-USMA team emerged victorious. At one-point Captain CURC was dragging its battery behind it, but it successfully defeated the Penn State team with a heavy barrage of fire and one well-placed round that disabled the camera of the Penn team, thereby blinding it. Overall the judges declared that Captain CURC was less damaged and awarded first place to the joint Columbia-USMA team. The robot's success was due in large part to the efforts of Pratheek Manjunath a robotics engineer working for the RRC.