19 November 2013

Competitive robot being assembled at ANU

| Barcham
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Zip!

ANU students Shanae King, Matt Shadwell and Jessica Evers, along with their as yet unnamed robot (I suggest “The Subjugator 5000”) hope to compete in a tournament of robots.

Sadly this tournament is some sort of obstacle course instead of a frenzy of robots tearing into each other with hammers and saws like a real robot battle, but still it’s pretty rad.

I wish them and the Subjugator 5000 the best of luck in Geelong next month.

Shadwell, Evers and King, who are finishing up their mechatronics degrees in the ANU College of Engineering and Computer Science, are building their very own robotic vehicle – entirely from scratch, including the GPS navigation unit – to compete with other uni students across Australia. They will travel to Geelong next month to showcase their robot.

“The basic aim is to build a ground- based robotic vehicle that has to navigate between GPS waypoints in a field and avoid obstacles,”
explains Shadwell.

“We thought it would be a really good opportunity to get our hands on some real gear and to get a practical application of the theory.”

Trial and Error, as Shadwell and his team mates are calling themselves, have already logged 200 hours building their as-yet-unnamed robot, and they still have a long road ahead of them.

“While we’re about halfway through building the physical robot, we still have all the programming to do, so I think we’ll easily log three times the number of hours that we have already.

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Build me a Jonny-5 and my childhood dreams will come true.

gooterz said :

Entirely from scratch?

Its not a cake and they haven’t done the programming yet. The programming is the hard part.

I don’t know the details of this particular system, but based on lots of experience in this domain I’d say you got that right!

Good luck to these bright young people for their future careers. It’s especially heartening to see young women getting into engineering.

Entirely from scratch?

Its not a cake and they haven’t done the programming yet. The programming is the hard part.

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