KUCHING – Swinburne University of Technology Sarawak Campus engineering students showed they are the best when they won the Freescale Cup championship title for the fourth time in a row, recently.
A second team from the university also bagged the second prize.
As the champions, Reginald Lim and Namakambo Muyunda will be heading to Erlangen in Germany to compete in the Freescale Cup Worldwide Finals in September.
Their model car took 27.66 seconds to complete the UiTM Shah Alam track while that of second place winners John Ranga Dinej Fernando and Narvesh Lautun was only .20 seconds behind.
International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM), which came in at third place, took 48 seconds to complete the task.
The Freescale Cup requires each team to build, program and race a model car on a track for speed. The machines have to be embedded with Freescale’s microcontrollers, and the fastest car to complete the track without derailing is the winner.
The two teams from Swinburne Sarawak, made up of robotics and mechatronics students, had started their preparations early in the year and put in many hours perfecting their machines, according to their advisors.
“They spent about six months designing, fabricating, implementing and testing their model cars,” said advisor Dr Hudyjaya Siswoyo Jo.
For the competition in Germany, the team will start work to improve the performance of their machine right after the final exam this month, said Riady
“We are excited to be in the fray for the global championship again. In the two years that we competed we were slightly more than a second away from becoming the world champion. This time, we hope to break the duck.”
Last year, Swinburne Sarawak came in at third place in the worldwide finals in Seoul, South Korea. In 2013, it won second place in Harbin, China.
The university has held the national championship title since 2012.
The recent competition saw a total of 64 teams from private and public institutions in the country fight for the coveted championship title.