Welcome to Robotics @ Maryland
R@M is the University of Maryland's student robotics team. We design and build autonomous robots to compete against other schools and organizations. The club formed in 2006; since then, R@M has grown to four robots and roughly 40 members.
Robotics @ Maryland membership is open to any UMD student, regardless of major. To get involved, contact any of our officers or come to a meeting.
Thank you to our generous sponsors!
News (see archive)
Raphael takes 4th place in the 2nd annual Autonomous Robot Speedway Competition
After working through the night into Saturday morning, the team was able to program Raphael to successfully navigate the competition course in the 4th fastest time. Raphael lost to the 3rd place team by a mere 4/10 of a second, taking 4th place out of 12 robots, after being penalized 9 seconds for hitting 3 cones.
Mechanical work on Raphael was completed the Thursday before last. A new rear servo was installed to allow the robot to steer both the front and rear wheels. Our turning radius before adding the rear servo was dismal.
Raphael uses Player/Stage to interface with various systems. On Tuesday we finished writing a fiducial driver to filter laser data and only pass cone points through to the deeper control systems. Unfortunately, the k-means clustering that we based the driver on didn't detect cones very well and was computationally expensive. We didn't realize this until Friday, after spending a majority of Thursday testing the k-means driver and a couple other basic obstacle avoiding algorithms.
On Friday we implemented a new cone filtering solution. This time everything worked extremely well, the driver was able to detect every cone with a fairly low amount of noise. However, after testing well into Friday night, we realized that we needed a new control algorithm. Even with near perfect cone detection, Raphael could barely get past a handful of cones.
Shortly before the competition Saturday morning, we emerged with a new control algorithm that worked surprisingly well. Although we didn't get much time to test and tweak our new algorithm, we had the 1st and 2nd place robots in our sights. We cranked Raphael's speed up to almost 90% and let him go. Raphael completed the first lap flawlessly, but then on the last 1/4 of the last lap, Raphael swerved to avoid hitting a cone on its left side, only to slam into two cones and graze a third on its right.
Thank you to all our sponsors and everyone who came out to watch and cheer us on.
Introductory meeting, First Look Fair, Eng. Community Picnic
R@M spent the last two days spreading information about the club and recruiting. We set up a pair of tables at the First Look Fair on McKeldin Mall both days, with Tortuga on display and Donatello driving around (and hauling people on the grass). After the rain essentially ended the FLF Thursday (but failed to do any damage to the 'bots), we moved the whole display to the field outside Martin Hall for the Engineering Community Picnic, where we found another lot of interested people. (We had Donatello carry Tortuga the whole way, naturally.) The day's third R@M event was the opening new-member meeting, where several leaders introduced potential recruits to the robots' workings.
We will be holding another introductory meeting on Tuesday, 9/22, at 6:30 in the Neutral Buoyancy Research Facility. If you're interested in joining the club or just want to see what we're doing, be there!
Also, we have a new announcements mailing list. If you were on the Yahoo! group, you've been subscribed to this one. Otherwise, you should sign up to keep track of changes in meeting schedules and other big news.
Robotics @ Maryland attends AUVSI Conference and Exhibition
Robotics @ Maryland (R@M) will be at AUVSI Unmanned Systems North America 2009 from August 11th to 13th. We will have a table in the exhibitors area next to the other AUVSI AUV Competition competitors. We will have Tortuga III? and demonstrations of our software? on display. This is the largest unmanned systems conference and exhibition in the world, and R@M looks forward to seeing what it has to offer and showing off our hard work.
Tortuga III Takes 8th Place in 12th AUVSI AUV Competition
Note: This post is for Tuesday August 4th, but its posted late due to connectivity issues
Tortuga III? took 8th place in the 12th annual AUVSI AUV competition. Despite not having as good a showing as we hoped we are still proud of our efforts. We accomplished much at the competition:
- Took 2nd place in the qualifying rounds
- 4th highest scoring round of quals & finals (only the winning team did better)
- The only team besides the winner to complete the bombing run objective at Transdec
- The only team besides the winner to complete the machine gun nest objective at Transdec
We did all this despite arriving with a mechanical and electrical system which had only 2 hours of water time, non-functioning torpedo launchers and motors which shut down randomly after a few minutes. In addition to fixing those issues, we overcame blowing our stack of electronics the day before the competitions first practice day.
The final run itself has an interesting story. Our final round was after Cornell, and because they failed to do the bins perfectly we could still win if we could do the bins, machine gun nest objectives, and briefcase objective perfectly. We had carefully programmed in timeouts so that if we failed to complete the earlier objectives Tortuga III would move onto the briefcase objective and secure second place. The problem was we went with an untested mission, and Tortuga III ended up against one wall when it timed out. It turns out that the sonar system could not pick up the pinger against the wall. Due to the length of the earlier timeouts, we did not have enough time to recall the robot and go for the briefcase only mission we did for qualifying. This left us with just the gate, pipe and flare on the score board.
We would like to again thank all of our sponsors, without whom we would not have there opportunity to compete in this competition.
Congratulations AUVSI AUV Competitors
Note: This post is for Tuesday August 4th, but its posted late due to connectivity issues
First we would like to congratulate the Cornell AUV Team for their win of the 12th annual AUVSI AUV Competition. For the past several years they brought a vehicle with excellent hardware and electronics, and this year they combine it with better software and lots of testing. They attempted every objective of the course and did all but one perfectly. We would also like to congratulate the 2nd place team from the University of Victoria and 3rd place team the University of Rhode Island. We look forward to competing against Cornell and the other competitors next year.
We would also like to give special thanks to the ETS SONIA team. For the third year in a row, they have proven the most congenial and sportsmanlike competitor. This year they let us use there miniature bins to let us test our bombing run AI the night before the final competition round.
Finally we would like to thank all of our sponsors, without whom we would not have there opportunity to compete in this competition.