Warman Design and Build Competition 2017 Outcome for Monash University Malaysia Campus

The Warman Design and Build Competition is held annually in Sydney where the winning team from each campus will represent their universities in the national finals. This year, the competition celebrated its 30th anniversary. Our team from the Malaysian campus won the Warman Design & Build Competition Judges’ Prize aside from securing 5th placing out of 18 other universities who competed, while Clayton campus secured 9th placing this year.

Final score sheet of 18 universities that participated in the 2017 Warman Design and Build Competition National Finals

In the national finals, 2 design awards are given aside from the 3 podium prizes:

Warman Design & Build Competition Judges’ Prize
National Committee of Engineering Design (NCED) Prize

Our team’s design were selected by a panel of industry members from Weir Minerals, who were the main sponsor for this competition. The judges were very impressed with the simplicity and how compact our device was built. The device, which was named as SONAR owed its navigation to a magnetic compass sensor and ultrasonic sensors to determine the features and orientation of the competition track for good reliability in delivering the payload. The challenge for this year was to collect 2 yellow golf balls, 2 squash balls and 2 racquetballs and separate the 2 golf balls so that they could be lodged into a bin while the other 4 balls were to be lodged into another taller bin.

Teams representing Monash University Clayton and Malaysia campus with their devices

Monash University Malaysia’s team receiving certificates for the Warman Design & Build Competition Judges’ Prize

Our team worked diligently out of their own time while juggling with the final weeks for Semester 2 to improve the performance and reliability of the device despite dealing with multiple in-semester assessments. The team members were:

Jay Lee Wing Wai
Low Jing Xin
Shahul Hameed Bin Mujib Kamal
Sanjay Jonathan Asirvatham
Park Jeung Huan

The team leader, Jay, was a very organised person, which enabled the team to work together and troubleshoot issues systematically. He was heavily involved in developing the navigation system of the device, which played a major role. Our only female member, Jing Xin was particularly meticulous and contributed most in the structural design and the sorting mechanism. We also saw a good increase in the number of female engineering students at the national finals. Each member in our team had a good mix of characters and were willing to learn new skills on their own and worked well together.

In the past few years, many other teams participating in the national finals were observed to utilize increasingly advanced motors and components. Despite this advantage, we were proud that our students managed such good results with just common off-the-shelf materials. We are hopeful to see our school continue in providing better components and machining facilities as we roll out a new elective (Advanced Engineering Technologies) in the following year.