The Rally is an international team competition aimed at fostering open innovation in engineering schools and faculties across Latin America. It seeks to provide creative, innovative, assertive, and, depending on the case, effective responses to real-life challenges. Each team selects the challenge, names the team, appoints a leader, and begins to design a strategy for how to approach the situation, identify a potential solution, and create a written deliverable and a pitch video of no more than 3 minutes. A key factor in this event is time, as teams have only 28 consecutive hours to generate, design, outline, or draft a possible solution simultaneously across all teams and locations in participating countries. Since this was María Cano’s first participation in the event, it did not register as a host, but as an independent team affiliated with the Universidad Industrial de Santander (UIS), the institution that hosted the teams participating in the virtual modality.

The Faculty of Engineering formed a group of 4 students from the Software Engineering program, after prior registration. The participating students were Roger Rivera Bañol (7th semester), Sofía Arismendy Quintero and Miguel Ángel Mejía Barrera (both in the 4th semester), and José Miguel Tejada Sossa (2nd semester). The team was named TECNOCANO TEAM, and in addition to delivering their solution, they were required to interact with a team from another country. In María Cano’s case, they interacted with the INCOING team from Chile.

This edition’s challenges were focused on finding solutions for issues such as: Microdams, Polluting Packaging, Connecting Generations, Avocado Waste, Evacuation, Debris Management, Unattended Parking Meters, and Reducing Food Waste. TECNOCANO developed a solution for the Unattended Parking Meter challenge.

The Unattended Parking Meter challenge consisted of: “Nowadays, in cities and large metropolises, the use of parking meters is increasingly common to better manage parking spaces on the streets. The idea is to propose better ways to implement the public service of urban parking, timed by the minute, considering that the driver simply parks and leaves, paying for the use of the space in the most unattended manner possible, without the need for intervention by municipal agents.”

The solution proposed by the team was: “Given that parking meter operations today are manual or semi-automatic, depending on the employee’s ethics and the user’s own actions, it is necessary to design an automated parking charge system based on license plate detection, monitored by cameras that record the vehicle’s plate, arrival and departure times, occupied space, and an error margin related to the correct use of the space. This system digitalizes the process, eliminating the need for human personnel and improving the efficiency and credibility of charge management, since the information gathered would be stored on a server connected to the Ministry of Transport for owner identification, invoice generation, and online payment.”

This idea, presented by the team, was considered innovative by the jury, earning them 3rd place among the teams participating at the Universidad Industrial de Santander (UIS) location.

From the institution and the Faculty, we congratulate the student team for their participation and achievement, thanking them for their dedication, their sense of belonging in representing the Faculty and the institution, and the enthusiasm and interest shown in generating an innovative idea.

The following link provides access to the Pitch presented and awarded by the Universidad Industrial de Santander to the TECNOCANO team: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrv5w2KKW4E