I was excited to see that my last post (Simulate in MATLAB, Animate in Blender) led to some remarkable follow-up responses.

Vasilis (a winner of the 2025 Cody Contest) and Lubor both re-created my gantry crane scene despite the fact that I hadn't posted anything beyond an animation. And their simulations were much more elaborate than mine, featuring shattered walls and tumbling bricks! Scroll to the bottom of my post to see all the comments, but I'll include Vasilis's masterpiece here.

A couple of days later, my blogging colleague Guy Rouleau posted his own Simscape Multibody version of the same scenario: Building and Controlling a Gantry Crane with Simulink, Simscape Multibody, and Codex. Check out this block diagram.

All this got me thinking that there's an opportunity here. Imagine a course, something like a miniature golf course, of crane control problems. You write the controller and we here at MATLAB Central run the sim and see who does the best. "Best" could mean a few things, but I'm thinking we limit the control power and your job is to write a time-optimal controller. Whoever can complete the course in the least overall time wins the prize.

You would see the four-state non-linear differential equation, with step-by-step access to the evolving state vector. Your controller outputs the force on the gantry cab so as to move the pendulum bob from the initial position to a settled final position, all without any collisions between the plumb bob and any obstacles.

For fun, I brainstormed a short list of potential challenges. We've already seen the Sprint and the Wall. Consider these the first few events in the Pend-o-lympics.

I just built a controller for the Mailbox. Here's my result. What's yours?

What do you think? Should we do a contest on this?