The Mars Rover robotics competition was held this Friday, March 4, in the Sanford Fleming building. The robots were modeled after NASA’s remote-controlled probes Spirit and Opportunity, which send images to Earth from Mars.
“I am very confident of the teams’ performances today,” said Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Parham Aarabi, who supervised the fourth-year engineering competition. “However, this is a small-scale project where distance is not a big issue. Next year, we plan to perhaps fly the students over to another country and navigate the robot over there, with the controls here in the APL [Artificial Perception Lab],” he continued.
The competition was a timed mock exploration in which students navigated their robots, which were equipped with microphones and cameras, through a maze, racing to solve a puzzle. The robots picked up video and audio clues that formed pieces of the puzzle along the way, while avoiding obstacles such as furniture.
The atrium was full of spectators. Sarah Ali, a fourth-year engineering science student was excited about the competition because of her interest in space exploration. “I think it was really nice to see the efforts of students come alive and not keep it behind closed doors the way it is for most projects.”
The robot controllers were located in the lab in the Bahen Centre for Technology, where the environment was busy and tense. “We’ve spent nights here in the lab working on this. There were days when everything went by quite smoothly, and then nights with lots of unexpected problems,” said Sang-Joon Lee, a computing engineer and a member of the Blue Team.
The electronic messages from the lab were sent wirelessly to the Sanford Fleming Atrium, about a block away. There, Richard Lishingman of Team Grey and others were monitoring the robots. “It’s been a long preparation, a lot of work, late nights; I’m really anxious to get it done,” said Lishingman. “Our biggest issue was transmission delay because the software doesn’t have a great [diversity of] internet connection protocols, and the second issue being bandwidth problems.”
Akram Nafee, an electrical engineer for Team Red, also had concerns. “When all the robots are connected, the video capture rate goes down significantly and we are not able detect the clues properly.”
The competition concluded with Team Red’s robot solving the puzzle first, taking less than two minutes to do so.
