Project Brief
Project CSE01: Robo Rescue
Background
A warehouse is about to collapse after a devastating fire. It's too dangerous to send emergency personnel in, but people trapped inside need to be located and saved. This is a job for robots! We don't have robots that can do this yet, but researchers in AI and robotics all around the world are trying to work out how to do it. RoboCupRescue is an international competition to foster research into rescue robots in particular and intelligent robots in general. UNSW has been very successful in the RoboCup soccer competition and now is involved with the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Autonomous Systems (CAS), which has a team that has participated in the competition for the past two years. RoboCup Junior is a competition for school students inspired by RoboCup with divisions in dance, rescue and soccer.
Your rescue task is a more challenging version of the RoboCup Junior rescue task.
Design Task
Your team will build a robot to navigate through a maze, find a small bottle (the victim), grab it, and take it out of the maze.
Your team will:
- design and construct a robot using the Lego Mindstorms Robotic Invention Set
program a Lego RCX microcontroller brick to read the robot's touch and light sensors and control its motors
- create a maze to test your robot and those of other groups
You are limited to one RCX brick, three motors, three light sensors, two rotation sensors and two touch sensors and the brick itself only has 32k of memory, so you must make efficient use of the hardware and memory.
Some teams will use the Lego NXT Mindstorms system.
Design Objectives
- The robot must complete the task as quickly as possible within a 5 minute time limit
- The program that controls the robot must be well organized and well documented.
- The maze you create must be challenging and look good.
Performance Evaluation
Your robot and maze will be tested and judged on the Thursday of week 11.
The performance is marked out of 100. Your robot will attempt three different mazes chosen from the ones submitted by all the groups.
There are 40 points available for how well your robot rescues the bottle from the maze. If your robot can find the victim and beep, you get 20 points. If you manage to pick up the victim you get 10 more points, and if you can get the victim out of the maze, you get 10 more. We will average the score from the 3 different mazes. There are 20 points available for the competition – the team with the minimum total time on the three mazes gets 20 points, with fewer points for the second place team and so on, with the last placed team getting 0. There will be separate divisions for the old RCX and new NXT systems.
There are 20 points for the how well written and documented your code is. There are 10 points for the design of your robot based on style, innovation and how cool it looks. There are 10 points for the design and construction of your maze. Neatness counts here!
Maze Specification
The maze is made from grey vinyl electrical tape on 40x32 sheets of white foam board. (You can get these from an art supply store including the one on campus.)
Your robot must follow the grey lines – if it goes off the line, or jumps to another line, it will be returned to the start. You are not allowed to reach over to another line to get the bottle. Intersections are marked with three black strips (made from black electrical tape) as shown. To help you keep track of where you are, each intersection is marked differently, using either long (15 mm long) or short (7.5 mm) strips. For example, the intersection in the bottom left of the picture below is marked LLS (ie the order of the strips as you approach the intersection is: long, long, short). Each intersection has a different pattern; that means that there is a maximum of eight intersections.
Lines will not be too close together – there will be at least double the width of a line between them. Intersections will have three or four lines at right angles. Each board must have a line exiting the board.
The victim you must rescue is a 600 ml Mt Franklin water bottle. It has 40 gms of rice or sand inside it so it doesn't fall over too easily. It will be on one of the grey lines, somewhere in the maze. You can indicate on your maze where the bottle is meant to go.
