While millions of people tuned in this week to watch a robot roll around Mars, a smaller group of engineering students and professionals was gathered at Disney's Epcot Center to watch robots of the flying variety. The seventh annual Aerial Robotics Competition took place Monday, pitting helicopter against mini-blimp against hovering vehicle in a test of the latest innovations in intelligent robotics.
"The stuff you see with the Mars rover has to come from somewhere," says Daryl Davidson, executive director of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International which sponsored the event. "[The competition] shows there are real-world applications for this technology, and shows the students that there are outlets for their creative energy."
Teams from 14 international universities plus one high school came with their creations, which were pitted against each other for a US$10,000 prize. In order to win, the robots had to fly over a course littered with "toxic waste" drums, identify the drum locations, read the labels, and bring back a sample of the "waste" - without remote control or human intervention of any kind. The Carnegie Mellon University team's intelli-helicopter won the competition - although it missed the waste retrieval task by an inch, and therefore brought home only $1,000 of the prize. The Department of Energy sponsored the event, along with NovAtel GPS systems.
"In the beginning, autonomous flight was just a chore - getting it to fly, let alone by itself," says research engineer Robert Michelson, founder of the competition and adviser for the Georgia Tech team. Last year was the first year that a robot (created by MIT) was able to fly on its own; this year three teams achieved that goal. Since the competition is made up of multiple tasks, however, no team has ever completed all of them - and each year that a team gets close to winning, the challenges are raised.
Davidson says the idea was to make the challenge difficult to attain, if winnable at all. "We want to challenge the minds who do this to keep coming up with innovative solutions. We have to keep raising the bar."
Two other events have spun off after the success of this competition, one for ground-based unmanned vehicles that took place in May, and another for underwater vehicles planned for next year. And as solutions are discovered in the yearly competitions, they are also showing up in real-world robotics - for example, law-enforcement surveillance, traffic monitoring, and border-patrol robots. And, of course, toxic-waste cleanup with no humans required.
