Design Competition:
Each team of students presents a written design report and an oral presentation to the judges explaining their robot’s design. The judges then examine the robots to gain a thorough understanding of their design and function. Teams are awarded points for innovative aspects of their robot’s design and function.
The Wisconsin Robotics Team along with Singularity, their submission for the Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition.
Photo Credit: Wes Miller of the Wisconsin Robotics TeamAutonomous Challenge:
Following the design competition, each robot is required to navigate an obstacle course without any external input; this task is the major event of the competition. The course consists of a path, outlined by white or yellow lines, that is littered with a variety of obstacles ranging from cones, to ramps, to sandpits and simulated potholes. The robots use a number of techniques to detect and avoid obstacles as they traverse the course. Most robots employ a camera and computer vision software to survey the surrounding environment and a number of short-range proximity sensors to avoid various obstacles, however teams can use other innovative systems to detect obstacles.
Navigation Challenge:
After their successful passage of the obstacle course, the robots are required to autonomously travel from a predefined starting point through a number of random waypoints, to a final destination. Obstacles are again placed in the robots’ paths to test their obstacle avoidance capabilities. One of the most difficult obstacles in this event is a fence with a randomly repositioned opening. The robots almost always feature GPS hardware that allows them to sense their exact global position.
JAUS Challenge (optional):
JAUS stands for Joint Architecture for Unmanned Systems; it is a communication protocol for controlling unmanned vehicles. The purpose of JAUS is to enable unmanned systems to be controlled by any device using the protocol, regardless of that devices hardware or software manufacturer. In the JAUS Challenge, the competition judges issue the robots a number of increasingly complex commands using the JAUS protocol. The robots are evaluated on their ability to obey these commands.
Wisconsin Robotics is one of the largest teams in the IGVC each year, with approximately thirty members. Each of the team’s members are interested in autonomous vehicles for different reasons, but one of its members says, "it ‘s the challenge […] everything has to fit together and it’s a combination of innovative mechanical design, electrical components [and software]. We’re just doing this because we think it’s cool. We don’t get any sort of course credit for it, we don’t have any incentive to do this other than that it’s cool.” The challenge posed by the IGVC is certainly a daunting one, the robots use state-of-the- art navigational systems and contain highly complex circuitry and mechanical components. Many robots in the IGVC cost over $20,000 to develop over the course of several years. “[The competition] can be stressful, mainly because it gets down to competition and it’s crunch time […] and building [the robot] is a lot of fun but getting to the competition and realizing that it doesn’t work outdoors on
their course is not so fun.”
The vehicle Wisconsin Robotics will enter into this year’s IGVC is called Singularity. Singularity has been under development for three years and features a number of innovative design elements that the team hopes will give the robot a competitive edge over its opponents. One of the most amazing aspects of Singularity’s construction is that almost all of its mechanical and electrical components were built from scratch by the Wisconsin Robotics team.