CSE students headed to finals of 2025 Bright Manufacturing Student Challenge
The Ride and Grind Crew, a group of undergraduate engineering students (Ethan Chung, Levi Krogh, Alexander Wan, and Raymond Zha are from ECE and Kevin Vo is a student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering), are advancing to the the Bright Manufacturing Challenge finals this October. This nationwide student robotics competition calls for student teams to design, construct, and test the circuit board for a “line-following robot”, which will follow a line on a floor track using various sensors. The UMN team successfully designed the main circuit board utilizing infrared sensors, motors, and a microcontroller, winning the first part of the competition.
In reflection, Ethan Chung shares that “the most valuable part of the experience so far has been seeing how AI can support PCB design. In past projects, one of the most tedious steps was digging through countless datasheets just to track down the right component. For this project, we tried using AI tools like Perplexity and ChatGPT to handle a lot of that searching…It ended up working really well and streamlined the whole process of finding parts”.