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Robotics Team Wins RoboMagellan Competition
Spybot, a completely autonomous robot created by Scott Barlow and Tyson Messori, competed in the RoboMagellan event this weekend, held at the International RoboGames event in San Francisco. The RoboMagellan event is held twice a year, entering the competition entails building a robot capable of GPS waypoint navigation, obstacle detection, and color tracking.
After two problematic first runs, Spybot completed a nearly perfect last run in a record 1:31 which was substantially lower than the next runner up time of 2:12. Spybot navigated the course using only wheel encoders, a digital compass, and nine sonar sensors, and then homed in on the cone with its camera. The on board ETek GPS was not used because its creators found it was giving highly inaccurate measurements that constantly drifted, despite indicating a low HDOP (they later found out this may be due to solar flares).
Find out more about the Spybot and its creators at the Robotics Club site.