Illinois Tech Robotics 2024 Recap
Lucas Ferguson
—Jan 05, 2025
Welcome to the Illinois Tech Robotics (ITR) 2024 Recap! This article highlights all the exciting projects, events, and achievements our team was part of this year. From competitions to conferences, it’s been a great year!
If you’re an Illinois Tech student curious about robotics (no matter your skill level or experience!!) we’re always excited to welcome new members. Don’t hesitate to reach out and join our community!
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About the team
The Illinois Tech Robotics (ITR) club is one of the oldest running clubs on campus with over 20 years of history during which many notable and unique robots have been created.
Table of Contents
- Automate Conference 🤖
- Welcome Week Student Org Fair! 🎉
- International Manufacturing Technology Show!
- UIC + Illinois Tech!
- New Executive Board Elections! 🏆
Automate Conference 🤖
Our team took the incredible opportunity to attend Automate 2024, the largest robotics and automation event in North America, held from May 6–9 at McCormick Place right here in Chicago! Hosted by the Association for Advancing Automation (A3), the event brought together 42,895 attendees and featured 867 exhibitors across an impressive 320,000 square feet of exhibit space. It was an unforgettable gathering for anyone passionate about robotics, artificial intelligence, and automation, making it the perfect event for our team! Learn more at https://www.automateshow.com/
We attended Automate with clear goals: to network, learn, and explore new opportunities for our team. To prepare, we created pamphlets and business cards to share with professionals interested in our work. The response we received exceeded our expectations as so many people were curious about what we were working on. It was exciting and encouraging to see how open and supportive everyone was toward us as students.
View the flyer we shared and photos from the event below:
Welcome Week Student Org Fair! 🎉
Date: August 16th, 2024
First event of the fall semester where we invite new students to join us at our first general body meeting (GBM). Recruiting efforts were super successful this semester with over 50 students at our first GBM, and more than doubling our executive board by the end of the semester!
International Manufacturing Technology Show!
Date: September 13th, 2024
Similar to Automate, the International Manufacturing Technology Show (IMTS) was held at McCormick Place, Chicago. Our team talked to well over a 100 exhibitors handing out many more flyers and learning a bunch more!
Check out Lucas' LinkedIn Post for a write up on his experience.
UIC + Illinois Tech!
Date: September 16th, 2024
Follow Chicago EDT on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chicagoedt/
Click here to see the below post
STEM Fest at Northern Illinois University (NIU) 🏫
On September 28th, the Illinois Tech Robotics club headed over to Northern Illinois University (NIU) to celebrate the 15th anniversary of STEM Fest. STEM Fest is an event held once a year to show off science, technology, engineering, art, and math to the youth, parents, and anyone interested. Exhibits and demonstrations filled the NIU campus with opportunities for STEM learning.
The Illinois Tech Robotics club began prepping for this event at the beginning of the Fall 2024 semester. We planned on reviving 2 of our robots for the event.
Roslund, one of our older robots about 18 years old, was stripped of its old components and restored. An arm powered by a linear actuator was added to the top with a Illinois Tech foam cheer wing to wave at people passing by.
Icarus, is a quadcopter (drone with 4 rotors) build many years ago, but has since gone through many tweaks and upgrades. For NIU the team wanted to get Icarus flying again with a new more advanced control system which included GPS, gyro stabilization, redundant communication over both Bluetooth and radio.
The day before the event, it was all hands on deck to get the robots back online. The Roslund team assembled the arm onto the chassis. Then the coding team went in and brought the robot back to life. Unfortunately, Icarus’ fate was not as bright, in a test of the full system the team accidentally shorted some wires causing a motor controller to burn out. Even without Icarus flying many still enjoyed seeing it. Early Saturday morning we gathered on campus and drove about 2hrs to NIU.
The NIU campus had various exhibits, booths, events, and attractions. The Robotics and Rover Exhibition was in the parking lot outside Anderson Hall giving robots ample space to zoom around. We exhibited our robots alongside NIU’s Rover teams rover for the Robotics and Rover exhibition. Our team had a bunch of fun teaching kids to drive Roslund and seeing them explore the movements of tank drive, mecanum drive, arcade drive, and the secret turbo speed button! The parents and kids stopping by our booth were amazed to see how big our robots were and were eager to learn more about them and how they came about. At the end, a dad accidently found the turbo button and crashed Roslund into the curb, breaking one of the gear boxes.
We overall had a great time at this event and can't wait to go back next year! 🎉
Learn more about the event at https://go.niu.edu/STEMFest
Group Photo of the ITR team at our booth at STEM Fest. Roslund is on the bottom right and Icarus is sitting on the right side of the table. Other robots we brought over were the XRP and Fenrir.ITR Team at NIU (from left to right): Natorion Johnson, John Gandeza, Nicholas Campeotto, Yael Martinez, Alex komonIi, Omar Pastrana, Paul Mosincat, Yuliana Sanchez, Anahi Solis, Lucas Ferguson, Fannie Yu.
We would like to thank the NIU STEM Fest coordinators for having us! Plus Special Thanks to all our ITR members that helped bring robots back to life!
Fall Festival + Pumpkin Launch! 🎃
The Office of Student Life put together a great Fall Festival on October 19th with a mechanical bull, lots of desserts, and build your own animal pillow. ITR's launcher is unique in that it uses a long spinning arm to accelerate the pumpkin before release. Unfortunately, our counter weight wasn't quite heavy enough to safely launch pumpkins, so the team instead opted for a basketball. Even with a variety of setbacks we all still had a bunch of fun and learned a lot for next year!
Flyer promoting the event -- featuring "Steel Force" (Pumpkin launcher from 2022)
New Executive Board Elections! 🏆
Congratulations to the new executive board!
- President - Natorion
- Vice President - Eli
- Treasurer - Danish
- VP of Philanthropy - Andy
- VP of Engineering - Sebastian
- Secretary - Harlee
- Lab Manager - Fannie
- Machinery Advisor - Nick
- Webmaster - Camryn
- VP of Propaganda (Publicity) Yael
- VP of Education - Mustafa
- Fundraising Chair - Lucas
Credits
Article Authors:
- Natorion Johnson (he/him, ITR President)
- Lucas Ferguson (he/him, ITR Treasurer)
- Fannie Yu (she/her, ITR Lab Manager)