The Auburn University Student Projects and Research Committee team took the gold this weekend in the SoutheastCon Student Hardware Competition.
"We can be very proud of our SPaRC students for bringing home the first place trophy," said Thaddeus Roppel, faculty adviser for SPaRC and professor in electrical and computer engineering.
The SPaRC team, founded by the late Professor Scotte Hodel in 2006, can also flaunt a plaque to be displayed for a year and $800 for the Auburn IEEE Student Chapter.
With a group consisting of only nine members, the team beat 45 other schools from Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and the country of Jamaica.
The annual IEEE event was hosted by the IEEE Atlanta Section and the Georgia Tech IEEE Student Branch.
"Engineers Making the World a Better Place" shaped this year's theme as each team had to construct an autonomous robot that could randomly pick up and sort aluminum, plastic and glass Coca-Cola containers.
"It felt really great winning," said Zach Lamb, a senior in mechanical engineering. "We had put in a lot of effort over the last eight months, and were hoping for some sort of reward for all of our hard efforts."
Auburn ended with 331 total points, while University of Tennessee Knoxville struggled in second with only 265 points.
Test runs were made Friday when the team traveled to Atlanta to prepare for Saturday's four rounds. Most other teams spent the night tweaking and making changes while Auburn just let "Aub-E" run.
"We actually didn't change a thing throughout the day Saturday because it was being really consistent in its performance" Lamb said.
Next year's theme was announce, giving teams a year to prepare for another competition.
"The focus is more electrical, but we plan on branching into other student design competitions," said William Woodall, a junior in software engineering.
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