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Robotics competition begins
this weekend in Maryland
By Luis Jiménez
Summer
Reporter
A team of Purdue engineering students will participate
this weekend in the
Annual International Aerial Robotics Competition,
to be held in Maryland.
Twelve students from various engineering departments
joined efforts to enter into the competition, which was started a few
years ago by Georgia Tech.
The competition's format consist of four stages
in which, team members have to design and put together a flying robot
capable of following GPS coordinates and waypoints, identifying buildings
and accessing the building through a window and send visual data back.
Finally, the competitors' robots have to do these three steps in less
than 15 minutes.
Each stage could take as much as a year to develop.
The competition is designed so a single mission could take up to four
years. However, if a team is able to complete the mission before the
end of the competition, it would start over again.
This was the case with last year's competition,
in which the team from a technical university in Berlin completed the
mission in less than four years.
Last year's mission was to create a flying robot
that could search through a disaster area and identify alive from dead
bodies. The robot had to fly regardless of rain, fire and smoke hazards.
The competition awards $30,000 and supplies some
of the electronic equipment to the team that creates a robot capable
of completing all the stages of the competition.
Marshall Alphonso, a graduate student in the Schools
of Engineering and team leader, said all the systems are still in design
and testing. He said that because all the systems are being developed
in parallel, which means at the same time, it's difficult to know how
far ahead are they in the competition.
Alphonso said they've been sponsored and supported
by several companies and by the electrical engineering department.
The team members are: Brian Mccombs, Mu Qiao, Marshall
Alphonso, Juan Pablo Pertierra, Bernardo Mesa,Linoy Alex,Ashray Ramachandran,
Vamsi Krishna, Mahesh Babu, Ankit Bhatia and Job Cherian.
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Robotics
competition begins this weekend in Maryland
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