(From second left) Namakambo, Lim and Zon are all smiles as they are joined by Freescale university programme manager for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) Flavio Stiffan (left) and business management, sales and marketing director for EMEA Pierre Bernoux.
KUCHING: Malaysian Freescale Cup champion Swinburne University of Technology Sarawak Campus outraced some of the top universities in the world at the finals of the intelligent car competition to take first runner-up in Germany recently.
Swinburne Sarawak engineering students Namakambo Muyunda, Reginald Lim and William Zon gave the competing teams a run for their money at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits, Erlangen, coming up only 3.45 seconds behind the champion.
The University of Science and Technology Beijing won the competition with 17.127 seconds, while the students from the Australian university branch campus set a time of 20.577 seconds.
The University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland was second runner-up at 20.760 seconds.
The competition requires each team to build and program a model car for a timed race on a track.
The machines have to be embedded with Freescale’s microcontrollers, and the fastest car to complete the track without derailing is the winner.
“We made some improvement to our technique and algorithm, and also utilised the latest hardware from Freescale which had better performance and processing power.
“We believe these made a difference to our performance,” said Hudyjaya Siswoyo Jo, who advised the team with his brother Riady.
After having been in the competition since 2011, he said that it got tougher each year as teams improved on technique and strategy.
“We are looking forward to utilise the latest microcontroller technology recently launched by Freescale. With the latest hardware, we will be able to implement a more intelligent algorithm which might help us to achieve better performance in the future,” Hudyjaya said.
As first runner-up winners, the Swinburne Sarawak students took home a cash prize of US$1,500 (about RM6,700) and Freescale semiconductor products.
Competing in the global finals were Bannari Amman Institute of Technology (India), University of California, Davis (US), Kumoh National Institute of Technology (South Korea), Instituto Tecnologico de Ciudad Guzman (Mexico), National Formosa University (Taiwan), and Instituto Federal de Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia do Ceará (Brazil).
Part of the trip to Germany for contestants included a visit to the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS, one of the world’s leading application-oriented research institutions for microelectronic and IT system solutions and services.