Warman Design and Build Competition 2025 Rules
The Warman Design and Build Competition challenges students to push the boundaries of Mechanical Engineering by developing practical solutions to theoretical problems.
Treasured by universities and students alike since its inception in 1988, the Warman Design and Build competition has allowed leading Universities to take engineering out of the classroom and into practice, allowing bright-minded students to create unique engineering solutions to help save the fictional planet of Gondwana.
The Competition is sponsored by Weir Minerals Australia Ltd (formerly known as Warman International) and is coordinated by the National Committee on Engineering Design (NCED) of Engineers Australia, affiliated with the Mechanical College.
If your university is participating in the 2025 Warman Design and Build Competition, please review the competition rules listed below. To proceed, complete the Expression of Interest (EOI) form to receive additional details, including key dates, resources, and next steps.
The Mission: Project SEESAW
The people of Gondwana need an innovative engineering solution.
For the past 37 years the people of Gondwana, a small planet orbiting a sun on the outer fringes of our galaxy, have triumphed over their new planet’s harsh environment. They have overcome complex problems using only the resources they have at hand and assistance from the brilliant minds of engineers from Earth.
These engineers have traversed impossible ravines with limited resources, contained dangerous nuclear contaminations and solved engineering feats that have made people’s lives easier and safer.
Once again the people of Gondwana are faced with uncertainty… and once again student engineers from Earth are here to help.
Challenge
Your team of student engineers has been set the task of designing and building a reduced scale, demonstration system which is capable of collecting three model meteorites and safely depositing them into the storage bunker. Over the last 37 years, Earth’s engineering students have rendered invaluable assistance with such engineering problems, and we anticipate you will again be successful on this thirty-eighth occasion
Context
Gondwana is an island on a planet orbiting a star on the outer fringes of the Milky Way. The Gondwanans have nearly exhausted their natural fuels and desperately need a sustainable alternative. Inhabitants, including plant and wildlife, will freeze in winter or overheat in summer if another option is not discovered. Depletion of the non-sustainable fuel is imminent.
Meteorites, containing rare minerals useful for sustainable energy supply, have recently landed in random locations on the island. Three meteorites of various size and weight have been identified for immediate use but due to the rapidly rising atmospheric temperature they must be autonomously collected and deposited in a fuel bunker on the other side of an unstable bridge. The high temperature environment means that this process must be completed quickly.
The Gondwanans have once again asked for assistance from Earth’s student engineers to design a system to collect and deposit the meteorites into a storage bunker. A scaled down prototype of their design will be manufactured and demonstrated.
Project SEESAW (Sustainable Engineering for Energy Supply in Advancing Worlds)
Objective
Prototype a reduced scale, proof-of-concept transport system, later referred to as the “system”, which will precisely deliver scale representations of the meteorites, from their respective settling zones to the storage bunker. Referring to Figure 1, the autonomous system will start from a safe area defined by the Start Zone. The meteorites will be simulated using a tennis ball, a racquetball and a table tennis ball (hence forth referred to as “balls”) which will be randomly distributed in a 3 x 3 grid. The system must traverse narrow gaps and potentially unstable terrain which is simulated by a pivoting plane or seesaw. Size constraints require your system to fit within an imaginary 400 mm sided cube. When activated via a single starting action, your system will autonomously collect the balls, negotiate the seesaw, or narrow gaps and deliver them to the storage bunker, shown as the ball deposit zone. The maximum allowed time for the operation is 120 seconds.
