KUCHING -The Swinburne University of Technology Sarawak Campus team returned home with their heads held high after winning second place in the Global Freescale intelligent car cup challenge in Harbin, China, recently.
The model race car of students William Zon Kok Weng, Ling Ting Yang, Mark Tee Kit Tsun and Carmella Sim Lee Yoong took 17.6 seconds to complete the 50-meter circuit at Harbin Institute of Technology to take the win.
University of Science and Technology Beijing took first place with 14.89 seconds while National Taiwan University of Science and Technology was third with 19.08 seconds.
The competition required student teams to build, program, and race a model car around a track for speed. The model cars had to be embedded with Freescale’s 32-bit microcontrollers. The fastest car to complete the track without derailing, wins.
The Swinburne Sarawak team was led by lecturer Dr Hudyjaya Siswoyo Jo and teaching assistant Riady Siswoyo Jo.
“Coming in at second place is a huge achievement for us especially when we had to compete with some of the top universities from around the world,” said a jubilant Hudyjaya.
“The team did a great job and learned a lot from just watching the China national level competition.”
Hudyjaya said the University of Science and Technology Beijing deserved to win.
“Of the eight years that China organised the competition, the university has been the champion for five consecutive years. To do that, the university had to beat more than 8,000 teams from all over China. They were undoubtedly a worthy opponent,” said the lecturer from the Faculty of Engineering, Computing and Science.
This year, teams from nine countries competed in the two-day event: Escola Politecnica da Universidade de Sao Paulo (Brazil); University of Science and Technology Beijing (China); South-Center University for Nationalities (China); Bannari Amman Institute of Technology (India); The University of Tokyo (Japan); Instituto Politecnico Nacional (Mexico); Swinburne University of Technology Sarawak Campus (Malaysia); Slovak University of Technology (Slovakia); National Taiwan University of Science and Technology; and the University of California Berkeley (US).
Swinburne Sarawak qualified for the global challenge after winning the Malaysian leg of the competition at the Multimedia University in Cyberjaya in July this year. They were declared national champion after beating 36 teams from the public and private institutions of higher learning in the country.