A small robot is hovering over a football field in Georgia. The tiny, helicopter-like device appears to be scanning the ground for something. It spots its quarry: one of several small magnetic disks inside a ring. The robot swoops down on the field to retrieve a disk and quickly transports it over a 3-foot-high plastic barrier into another ring at the opposite end of the field.
No, it's not a prop from a lost Ed Wood movie. It's one of 10 autonomous airborne machines competing for a US$10,000 prize in the fifth annual International Aerial Robotics Competition. Held every summer at the
Georgia Institute of Technology, the contest requires the fiying bots to complete a set of tasks - without radio-controlled assistance.
This year, Global Positioning System receivers helped Stanford University's helicopter pick up first place. "They used GPS to stabilize the vehicle and allow it to navigate around the arena," says Robert Michelson, a principal research engineer at Georgia
Tech and the competition organizer. Because Stanford's robot used a magnet capable of grabbing the target disk but not releasing it, the team took home only $7,000. However, says Michelson, "that was the first time anyone ever moved a disk in the competition."
While Stanford's robot navigated to the pickup area easily, it relied on luck to lift a disk, bobbing a string-attached magnet from the helicopter a few times before heading for the drop-off ring.
Coming in second was a blue blimp from Technische Universität, in Berlin, a robot which, Michelson says, "knew exactly where it was in the arena at all times" by triangulating its position with ultrasonic beacons.
The University of Texas at Arlington entered a wingless tail-sitter plane, designed to locate and hover above the ring while tracking it with a small TV camera. Says Michelson, "It had a vision system that could recognize the shape of the disk," but it came in third due to navigational problems.
The University of Southern California's robot oriented itself with machine vision, keeping track of the football-field yard lines as it fiew overhead. Georgia Tech's helicopter carried a small sub-bot that descended on a thread to locate the disks then signaled the mother ship to be picked up.
Sponsored by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, the competition was designed to promote autonomous fiying robots for battlefield reconnaissance and munitions delivery, as well as for pipeline-leak searches. "I guess it's the creator in me wanting to build thinking automatons," says Michelson, who is developing an autonomous helicopter for the US Army.
To receive rules for next year's competition at Florida's Epcot Center, send a blank e-mail message with the subject line REQUEST 96 IARC RULES to: robert.michelson@gtri.gatech.edu.
SCANS
Disk-Snatching Flybots
