For the Canadian Engineering Competition my team traveled to McGill University in Montreal, QC to compete against the winners and runners up of the Ontario, Quebec, Eastern Canada, and Western Canada competitions. In this competition, the challenge was to create an amphibious vehicle that could travel across grass, sand, and water. Every team came up with a similar design where the wheels doubled as paddles in the water, but our team had some distinct aspects of our design that set us apart.
We created a unibody design out of one piece of foam that decreased seams allowing our vehicle to be waterproof. We also chose to gear down our motor to provide more torque to the wheels at the cost of speed. This proved to be very effective because it was the extra torque gained was essential for traversing the uneven terrain and it would have been difficult for the wheels to get any traction if they were spinning any faster. These strengths in our design helped us finished tied with one other team with the best performances in the testing period. Our ability to justify our design and our efficient use of our budget gave us the edge and made us Canadian champions.
