Seven UA engineering students placed 13th out of 50 teams at the IEEE SoutheastCon Hardware robotics competition on Mar. 20, according to team member Chris Millan.
According to a UA news release, the competition was designed last year after the 2010 Haiti Earthquake and features tasks resembling rescue missions that student-designed robots must complete.
“Our robot was supposed to be an autonomous search-and-rescue robot,” Millan said. “The goal was that the robot would travel around a disaster site, a building which was wooden walls and a floor to form four rooms.”
Millan said the team designed their robot to follow the walls of the course to navigate using infrared rangefinders. The robot used a camera to find the “victims.”
“Throughout the course there were blocks of wood to represent obstacles that the robot would have to navigate around or over. In these rooms there were PVC end caps that represented victims of the disaster, and they had a green LED on top to indicate what their status was alive, unconscious, or dead,” he said.
Millan said that the team had been together for one year as part of a senior design project run by associate professor of electrical and computer engineering Kenneth Ricks.
“I wanted to join because it was by far the most interesting project available for senior design, and I also had plenty of interest in robotics so it seemed like the perfect opportunity,” Millan said.
According to the UA news release, UA’s team finished 6th out of about 50 teams at the 2010 competition. This year, Millan pointed to navigation problems as the reason their robot placed where it did this year.
“At the competition, our robot had more trouble navigating over and around obstacles,” he said. “We were mostly able to overcome them with minimal failure aside from one which got us stuck and ended our second run.
According to the release, the other members of the team were Taylor Hall from Montgomery, Bianca Kuczynski from Owens Crossroads, Stephen Palecek from Northport, Andrew Price from Birmingham, Jeremiah Ritchey from Guntersville, and James Yerby from Madison.
