Saving the Avengers at the 19th annual Engineering Physics robot competition

Last week, good and evil faced off in “Robo-Avengers: Infinity Loop,” an Avengers-themed robot competition at UBC.

Sixteen teams of second-year UBC Engineering Physics students — eight representing the evil Thanos, the other eight his good twin, “Meta-Thanos” — designed and fabricated fully autonomous robots to capture as many Avengers and Infinity Stones as they could along a course within a two-minute period.

The top-ranked teams in this year's competition were:

1st - Batman (Ben Huckell, Kritika Joshi, Josh White, Josh Zindler)

2nd - Hedwig (Alex Carbo, Sarvan Gill, Kausik Krishnakumar, Maxwell Yang)

3rd - Old brown shoe (Jacqueline Crowe, Gokce Dilek, Richard Echegaray, Julia Rosenrauch)

4th - An encounter in the PB aisle (Lauryn Cheung, Nicholas Kwan, Gregory Reid, Vala Vakilian, Zachary Watkins)

All students worked tirelessly on their creations over the summer months, devoting an average of 12 hours every weekday — and participating in an overnight work session before the competition — to prepare for the event.

Past competitions have involved one-on-one hockey, volleyball, search-and-rescue and wall-climbing robots.

The Engineering Physics program's Introduction to Instrument Design course (ENPH 253) teaches prototyping skills used in modern product development, aiming to help equip students for careers in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, quantum computing and other fields that call for deep physics knowledge and practical engineering skills.  

For more photos from the competition, please see the event album. More videos relating to ENPH 253 are available on the course's YouTube channel.