University of Maryland Hosts Third Annual Autonomous Robot Speedway Competition

The University of Maryland hosted the third annual Autonomous Robot Speedway Competition (ARSC) on Saturday, Oct. 16, from 10:00 a.m. – 2:00 p.m. in the Jeong H. Kim Engineering Building Rotunda on the College Park campus. The event was sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers Robotics and Automation Society, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers Computational Intelligence Society, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers Sensory Council and University of Maryland's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

This year's competition attracted 11 competing student teams, including teams from Johns Hopkins University, Prof. Gil Blankenship's 408I Autonomous Robotics Capstone Design Course and the Robotics@Maryland student organization. UMD Team #5, consisting of undergraduate students Usman A. Chaudhry, Nuttiiya Seekhao, and Nicole Yvette Word, won first place and received a prize of $250, UMD Team #4 - Abhishek Kumar, Denis Isael Morales, and Nicholas Sovich - won second place and received a prize of $150, and UMD Team #1 won third place and received a prize of $100. The members of this team were Yi Wei Lee, Xi Yang, and Mohammed Al Yaman.

The competition required each team’s autonomous robot to race around an array of traffic cones organized in a circular shape in the rotunda of the Jeong H. Kim Engineering Building. The competition was originally scheduled to take place outdoors, but wind forced the event inside. 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.

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

Published October 18, 2010