The Holcombe Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Clemson University is celebrating yet another historic achievement! Clemson’s IEEE SoutheastCon Hardware Competition team secured first place among 44 university teams this past weekend in Charlotte, marking Clemson’s third win in the past five years.
This year’s competition theme was “Mining Mayhem,” a futuristic scenario where an autonomous rover was needed to collect valuable extraterrestrial materials from asteroids before they drifted away. The teams were tasked with designing and programming a robot that could navigate a designated playing field, avoid obstacles, identify a randomized rendezvous pad using telemetry, transport ‘cosmic shipping containers,’ and correctly deposit materials for maximum points, all under a strict time limit.
The competition rules and theme were announced before the fall 2024 semester and were refined throughout the school year. The Clemson team worked on their robot the entire academic year as part of Creative Inquiry courses.
ECE’s IEEE faculty advisor Dr. Bill Reid shared this message:
Fellow ECE Tigers,
Dr. Raza and I are overjoyed to announce to you all that our Department’s IEEE SoutheastCon Hardware Competition team placed first out of forty-four university teams this past weekend in Charlotte. Our students have now won first place in this contest in three of the last five years.
We would like to thank the team for all that they did to achieve this honor, and we would also like to thank Dr. Xiao, Dave Moline, Gale Black, and the whole 3-D Printing Team for their continued support of our team and being an instrumental part of its success.
I believe we had the largest team that Clemson has ever fielded for this contest, and this was instrumental in our victory since it also had the most difficult requirements and the best competition that I can recall ever facing. Everyone in our department should be extremely proud of the way our students represented Clemson in this achievement with their dedication, hard work, creativity, teamwork, confidence, esprit de corps, and their strategic and tactical decision-making before and during the fray of competition.
But most of all I’d like to thank our team for how well their sportsmanship represented our department and matchless institution. You can’t imagine how proud I was Friday night when I got on the elevator to retire for the night, and a student from Valencia University noticed my Clemson shirt and began to relate to me how appreciative he was that some of our team had helped him solve problems his team was having with their vehicle. This my friends, is what has our students—to use an old Clemson expression—needing “no introduction.”
Hopefully we can put another great team together next year and go for a good ole Tiger Three-peat in Huntsville, Alabama.
Very, very proud to be a Clemson Tiger!
Bill Reid
Please congratulate the following students for their well-deserved success:
Clemson’s SoutheastCon Robotics Team (Fall 2024, Spring 2025)
Seniors
Amanda Swearson – Electrical Engineering (Two-time Champion — Captain)
Miguel Alday – General Engineering (Two-time Champion)
Connor Belli – Computer Engineering (Two-time Champion)
Marcelle Gregory – Computer Engineering (Two-time Champion)
Cameron Nowell – Electrical Engineering (Two-time Champion)
Rodney Stowe – Electrical Engineering (Two-time Champion)
Piniel Abera – Computer Engineering
David Bootle — Computer Engineering
Caleb Briggs – Computer Engineering
Alec Chalfant — Electrical Engineering
Joshua Deji — Electrical Engineering
Christian Lawrence – Electrical Engineering
Eli Savage — Computer Engineering
Alvi Topuzi — Electrical Engineering
Rodney Williams – Electrical Engineering
Juniors
Isabella Corbit – Mechanical Engineering
Natalia Jenkins — Electrical Engineering
Marvin Diaz Lopez – Computer Engineering
Matt Esposito – Computer Engineering
Sophomores
Jacob Danielle – Computer Engineering
Cole Kitchen – Computer Engineering
Elijah Reid – Electrical Engineering
Freshmen
Layla Fontanez – General Engineering
Aileen Roorda – General Engineering
Exchange Students
Shannon Leong – Exchange Student
Enya Ong – Exchange Student
