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Autonomous Robotics Competition, Sign up !!!
Monday March 24, 2008

Wow, its been WAY too long since I last blogged. I used to have an alarm that would go off every week, but I just trained myself to ignore it as I was always too busy. Now, I've decided to change the alarm to once a month, lets see what happens.

There is too much really cool stuff that has gone on since I last posted, but I need to start somewhere. So here goes.

In the past few months, I became a board member of a local non-profit school based in San Diego California. The goals of the school are to teach Software Engineering to middle and high school kids. We do this through the use of Java and other interesting curriculum content. The school was founded by Vic Wintriss and is called Wintriss Technical Schools (http://www.wintrisstech.org). Its been a lot of fun and I have had many opportunities to look at software engineering from a different vantage point, from a kids perspective trying to do really cool stuff in today's day and age.

The school does its best to be flexible with its curriculum and its students. One of my students was getting a little bored with some of the programming we were doing, so we took a little side road. This side road turned out to be fun, in a couple of ours we were able to put together a stop motion movie using some pretty simple tools. It took us another couple of hours to get our video together to post on You Tube, you can see it at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7QHU4TnOMY - Clay Time

Now to the point of this entry. Another way we are trying to get our students into what they are doing, is to give them the opportunity to make their work more visible and to add some pressure and value to what they are working on. To this end the school is putting on an autonomous robot competition. You will find a lot of information at
http://www.iaroc.org

The competition is open to anyone who wants to sign up. The web site is primitive and needs work, but it does contain a significant amount of information about the competition. We have some teams from students of the school already signed up. Its been quite the experience for them as they get to work on putting logos togerhter, help with the planning, as well as work on their own robot. Being able to work with physical objects along with software is a very gratifying experience, even indirectly through working with a child.

The competition has three phases

1) Technical Presentation

20 minutes presentation on the technical aspects of the chosen platform and algorithms.
2) Urban Challenge

20 minutes to traverse a maze as fast as possible. Many tries allowed within time allocation. Intent is to have robot learn maze through its multiple tries. Winner is the robot with the fastest time through the maze. Maze is static.
3) Gold Rush Challenge

All entries are placed into an arena with obstacles, the first robot to reach one of three beacons wins. Second place goes to second robot to another beacon, and so on. This challenge is intended to have the robot work through a more dynamic environment than the Urban Challenge.

There will be money and other prizes handed out to the top 3 in the following categories:

Junior - Grade 8 and lower
Senior - Grade 9-12
Open - Any grade, any age

There is a $250.00 sign up fee, however with that you get a Sun SPOT developer kit (http://www.sunspotworld.com) and a Create from iRobot (http://www.irobot.com/sp.cfm?pageid=305).

Come take a look and sign up, registration is open.

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