We invited student teams to participate in the Tapia 2007 Robotics Competition. The Robotics Competition was focused around a search and rescue task. The competition involved simulated and physical disaster environments where the goal was to identify and locate a number of different objects. The competition was a staged event with the first stage involving building a Player client for object-seeking in an environment-rendered Gazebo. The second stage required a client to control a Roomba robot endowed with touch and camera sensors.

Each robot had sensory information in the forms of: a blobfinder, odometry, bump sensors, and virtual wall detection. Each team was also provided a map with the locations of fiducials and walls. However, the start locations of each robot, objects, and food were not revealed until 5 minutes prior to each trial.

Competition Winners

Robotics Competition Winner:
Team Name: HMC Escher
University: Harvey Mudd College
Team Members: Vedika Khemani, Jessica Wen, Rachel Arce-Jaeger
Advisor: Zach Dodds

Robotics Technical Achievement:
Team Name: Nexus 6
University: Simon Fraser University
Team Members: Angelica Lim, Angelina Fabbro, Kathleen Tsoukalas, Lorin Beer
Advisor:Richard Vaughan

Important dates

For more information about the competition, please visit: http://www.cs.duke.edu/csed/tapia07

Co-chairs
Dr. Jeffrey Forbes, Duke University
Dr. Chad Jenkins, Brown University
robotics@richardtapia.org

Robots contributed by iRobot Corporation

www.irobot.com