By Gabby Benedict, CEC Student Intern

Miami University’s College of Engineering and Computing recently had a team be selected as one of 20 teams to compete in the SICK Automate Show’s 2022-2023 TiM10K University Challenge.

The TiM10K University Challenge involves university teams from across the U.S. to solve a problem by bringing a new application that utilizes the SICK scanner in any industry. The competition’s prize is $10,000 along with a trip to SICK’s headquarters in Germany.

Dave Hartup, an assistant teaching professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department, was told about the competition over the summer while attending a trade show in Detroit with Miami.

“We were representing Miami's Robotics Engineering program and the company [SICK Inc.] asked if we might be interested in participating in their competition. I passed that information off to Brad and basically, he did mostly everything after that,” Hartup said.

Brad Gartner is the team’s leader and is a junior Robotics Engineering major at Miami. After creating a proposal for the project and filling out an application, Gartner’s team, formed through Miami’s robotics club, was accepted and supplied with a SICK LIDAR and accessories.

The team was also given a license to AppSpace, an eco-system where an individualized SensorApp can be developed for the TiM-P LIDAR.

“My proposal was written on using the LIDAR for monitoring crops in farm fields. I explained that we'd be using SPOT Mini, a quadruped robot down in the mechanical engineering department, to attach the LIDAR onto in order to navigate the farm field and create a digital map of it using the LIDAR device,” Gartner said.

Over the next few months, Gartner and the other four members of his team will practice using the LIDAR to better understand how to use it in order to solve their proposed problem.