The AMD Jerry Sanders Creative Design Competition (JSDC) was an annual robotics competition at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) where engineering students from around the country design and build robots to compete in a game. After the 28th annual competition (2015), the competition changed its name to the Midwestern Robotics Design Competition after their main sponsor, AMD, pulled out.
Each year, a new game objective is created that tests the skills of the teams in creative design and functionality. Team registration usually ends in mid-January for the competition in March and is open to any college or university team. Some universities, such as UIC, send multiple independent teams to compete.
Teams spend nearly a year designing and constructing their robot for the event, after which students from universities nationwide travel to the UIUC Engineering Open House in March to compete in the 2,000 sq ft (190 m2) arena for the exciting two-day (Fri-Sat) event. MRDC is a popular event that attracts thousands of spectators to take in the action each day. The Design Competition is made possible by generous funding from ARM and hard work from the MRDC Committee at UIUC.
As the official MRDC website describes, "The competition promotes engineering disciplines and offers students a chance to demonstrate their technical abilities and creativity while applying knowledge learned in engineering courses. Overall, the design competition presents a well-rounded multi-disciplinary engineering challenge to future engineers."
The 23rd annual 2010 competition featured 20 teams from five different universities that competed in a giant game of tic-tac-toe played with colored balloons. The 29th installment of the engineering challenge (2016) promises once again to be an exciting and fun event for everyone involved. The 2016 course will include two levels, and gates that open and close. This will force teams to work on a strategy to get into the inner circle before scoring.
The official website has changed however the old website link will redirect you to their new page.