Robot competition
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A robotic competition is an event where robots have to accomplish a given task. Usually they have to beat another robots in order to become the best one.
Most competitions are for schools but as time goes by, several professional competitions are arising.
There is a wide variety of competitions for robots of various types.
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[edit] Duke Annual Robo-Climb Competition (DARC)
Hosted by Duke University, the Duke Annual Robo-Climb Competition (DARC) challenges students to create innovative wall-climbing robots that can autonomously ascend vertical surfaces. The competition, which will be held on Duke's campus in Durham, North Carolina, will allow students to showcase their wall-climbing technology in an international forum and encourage students to network with industry leaders.
[edit] DARPA Grand Challenge
The DARPA Grand Challenge is a competition for robotic vehicles to complete an under-200 mile, off-road course in the Mojave Desert. The unclaimed 2004 prize was $1,000,000. The farthest any participant got was only 7.4 miles. However, the 2005 prize of $2,000,000 was claimed by Stanford University. In this race, four vehicles successfully completed the race. This is a testament to how fast robotic vision and navigation are improving.
The Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition (IGVC) is a competition for autonomous ground vehicles that must traverse outdoor obstacle courses without any human interaction. This international competition sponsored by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI), is a student design competition at the university level and has held annual competitions since 1992.
In Micromouse competitions, small robots try to solve a maze in the fastest time. Micromouse competitions were held in Tampere Finland Technical University around 1983-1985. Professor Yrjo Neuvo was a head of the competitions.
Finnish Robotic Society ([1])held 15th July 2006 a Finnish Off-Road robotic Car competition in Jami, Finland ([2]). The cars must operate in road and off-road. The judge put four wooden sticks to ground to form a 200 m loop 10 minutes before start. The cars must make a loop as fast as they can in two hours competition time. The location may include trees, heavy grass, rocks or similar obstacles. The cars can be anything, but they must fit to 1*1*1 m box. They must be autonomous, not remote controlled. Not other limitation exists. One team succeeded the task.
[edit] First competition
Dean Kamen, Founder of FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), created the world's leading high school robotics competition. FIRST provides a varsity-like competitive forum that inspires in young people, their schools and communities an appreciation of science and technology.
Their robotics competition is a multinational competition that teams professionals and young people to solve an engineering design problem in an intense and competitive way. Their outreach includes the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC), the FIRST Vex Challenge (FVC), the FIRST Lego League (FLL), and Junior FIRST Lego League (JFLL). These four competitions are each geared separately at students aged 14-18, 14-18, 9-14, and 6-9 respectively. In 2005, there were over 100,000 students and 40,000 adult mentors from around the world involved in at least one of FIRST's competitions.
Unlike the Robot sumo wrestling competitions that take place regularly in some venues, or the Battlebots competitions on TV, these competitions include the creation of a robot. For the FLL program, the robots are entirely autonomous; the FVC competition involves separate autonomous and driver control matches; and the FRC competition involves an autonomous period (10 or 15 seconds) followed by a driver control in their matches.
[edit] Robocup
RoboCup is a competitive organization dedicated to developing a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world soccer champion team by the year 2050. There are many different leagues ranging from computer simulation, to full-size humanoid robots.
RoboCup Junior is similar to RoboCup. RoboCup Junior is a competition for primary and secondary school aged students. RoboCup Junior includes three competitions:
- soccer - two robots per team play autonomously in a game of soccer
- rescue - an obstacle course in which a robot must follow a line to retrieve an object, and bring it back to safety as fast as possible
- dance - robots are designed to dance to music and are judged on criteria such as creativity and costumes
As is the case with RoboCup, all robots are designed and developed solely by the students and act autonomously without any form of remote control or human intervention.
[edit] AAAI Grand Challenges
The two AAAI Grand Challenges focus on Human Robot Interaction, with one being a robot attending and delivering a conference talk, the other being operator-interaction challenges in rescue robotics.
[edit] Centennial Challenges
The Centennial Challenges are NASA prize contests for non-government funded technological achievements, including robotics, by US citizens.
[edit] TV Shows
The popularity of the TV shows Robot Wars Robotica and Battlebots, of college level robot-sumo wrestling competitions, the success of "smart bombs" and UCAVs in armed conflicts, grass-eating "gastrobots" in Florida, and the creation of a slug-eating robot in England, suggest that the fear of an artificial life form doing harm, or competing with natural wild life, is not an illusion. The worldwide Green Parties in 2002 were asking for public input on extending their existing policies against such competition, as part of more general biosafety and biosecurity concerns. It appears that, like Aldous Huxley's concerns about human cloning, questions Karel Čapek raised eighty years earlier in science fiction have become real debates.
[edit] Others
The Mobile Autonomous Systems Laboratory (http://maslab.csail.mit.edu) is one of the few college-level vision-based autonomous robotics competition in the world. Conducted by and for MIT undergraduates, this competition requires multithreaded applications of image processing, robotic movements, and target ball deposition. The robots are run with Debian Linux and run on an independent OrcBoard platform that facilitates sensor-hardware additions and recognition.
