In the 2008 undergraduate competition for NSC grants for special topic research plans, out of the 46 TKU students applied, 21 have got it. The College of Engineering has pulled out the first with 11 winning cases which were about half of all the 21 cases. Every winning student would have NT$32,000.

Senior student from the Department of Mechanical and Electro-Mechanical Engineering, Yong-ren Zheng co-worked for 8 months with two fellow students on “The Design of the Mechanical System for Human-Shaped Robot’s Visional Avoidance of Obstacles.” A robot may come across many obstacles while working. The research made use of webcam to catch images, and after complex calculations, the robot would decide to walk around or destroy the obstacle in front. Yong-ren Zheng said, “We have come across a great deal of difficulties in the research. For example, when we planned the simulation chart of the robot, it took us more than two months to finish it because every team member had a different part of the project. It was pretty hard, but I will continue with this type of research. Japanese robots are very practically usable, and I hope I will also be able to design usable robots.”

The research plan of the senior student, Ya-di Hao from the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, aimed at enhancing the running speed of the Internet. His topic was “Increasing the Network Proficiency by Controlling Adding Overlapping Multi-Channels with Topology for Wireless Internet.” He expressed, “Although I have explored such technology before, the research plan is much more complicated. Luckily Professor Kuei-Ping Shih has given me a lot of advice and we discussed about it regularly every week. That has really helped solve many problems in the research.” ( ~ Dean X. Wang )