The Engineering Design Challenge (EDC) is a university-level engineering competition for the region. The AUB Robotics Club ran it for the first time at the American University of Beirut in 2015. The theme of EDC 2.0 was “Drive Smarter”.
The idea behind it is simple. Engineering students in the region get very little hands-on practice, so many graduate without ever applying what they studied. EDC gives them that practice, and pushes them to research things no course covered: control theory, machine learning, navigation systems and computer vision.
For EDC 2.0, teams designed and built small self-driving cars for two games, Driving Test and Shawarma Express. The cars had to use sensors and control systems to finish the games on their own, with no human help.
