Vaughn College engineering and technology students attended the 16th annual Latin American and Caribbean Consortium of Engineering Institutions (LACCEI) Conference in Lima, Peru in July. Vaughn’s student team research papers were accepted for presentations and also publication for the LACCEI 2018 journal. Among the ten finalists, two Vaughn student papers were selected to compete for the student paper session, and all three submitted papers were accepted for the poster session.

“Smart Autonomous Robot Design for VEX U Challenge – In The Zone” by Niki Taheri ’20 and Atif Saeed ’20 and “Development Process of a Smart UAV for Autonomous Target Detection” by Utsav Shah ’18 and Ryan Tang Dan ’17 were finalists for the student paper session and also presented in the poster session. “Compactable Stool” by Jamal Sharifi ’18 and Nicolas Ceballos ’18 was the third student team to present in the poster session.

Taheri ’20 and Saeed ’20 presented their robot project that was designed, developed and constructed in preparation for the 2018 VEX World Championship. Their paper outlined the project idea of creating a robot to compete in matches consisting of a forty-five second autonomous period followed by one minute and fifteen seconds of driver-controlled manipulation. This project received the third-place award in the student poster competition from the Executive Director of LACCEI, Dr. Maria Petrie.

Shah ’18 and Tang Dan ’17 presented their remote and autonomous drone projects that were designed, developed and completed during spring 2018. Their paper outlined the project idea of creating two micro aerial vehicles weighing less than 500 grams and how the two different types of package delivery, pickup, obstacle avoidance and hover/landing capabilities performed with autonomous and manual control.