UMD Hosts Autonomous Robot Speedway Competition, Oct. 16

The 2010 Autonomous Robot Speedway Competition (ARSC) competition will be held on the University of Maryland campus on Saturday, October 16, 2010.

The University of Maryland will host the third annual Autonomous Robot Speedway Competiton (ARSC) on Saturday, October 16, from 10:00 a.m. – 2:00 p.m. in the XX parking lot outside the Computer Science Instructional Center (CSIC) Building on the College Park campus. The event is sponsored by the University of Maryland's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Washington, DC Chapter of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers Robotics and Automation Society (IEEE-RAS), the IEEE Sensors Council, and the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society.

This year's competition has attracted 15 competing student teams, including teams from Johns Hopkins University, Howard University, and various University of Maryland teams, including several from Prof. Gil Blankenship's 408I Autonomous Robotics Capstone Design Course and the Robotics@Maryland student organization.

The competition requires each team’s autonomous robot to race around an array of traffic cones organized in a circular shape. The robots' autonomous navigation included obstacle avoidance, dead reckoning, telemetry, onboard sensor processing, computer vision. This systems engineering exercise provided students engaged in the competition with an opportunity to practice an integrated, interdisciplinary approach to solving problems and optimizing performance.

In the event of rain, the event will be held inside the Jeong H. Kim Engineering Building Rotunda.

For more information about the competition, visit: http://www.ece.umd.edu/arsc

To see photos from the event, please click on the following link:
http://www.ece.umd.edu/News/images/09_10_ARSC/

Published October 8, 2010