An ISI team led by Dr. Behnam Salemi won the Planetary
Robotic Contingency Challenge competition at the 2008
International Conference on Robotics and Automation (IRCA-
2008) in Pasadena, May 21-22.
The general theme for this year's ICRA challenge was space
robotics. The challenge simulated a series of unexpected
problems occurring at a planetary habitat, where a robotic
solution must be quickly developed and deployed, using only
existing resources and robotic modules.
ISI's team, named Morpheus, came from Dr. Wei-Min Shen's
Polymorphic Robotics Lab. Harris
Chiu and Feili Hou
contributed to the software development, Nadeesha
Ranasinghe contributed to the vision and control, Rizwan
Khan, Mike Rubenstein and Jacob Everist helped in the
preparation and hardware construction. "The robot we
designed was very powerful and flexible to adapt to
unexpected tasks, and the competition really showed the
value of teamwork," said Salemi.
The challenges were announced each morning at 8:30AM
and had to be solved by 1:00PM.
The competing teams had no advance knowledge of the
events and had to design and construct a robot on the spot,
deploy the robot via an airlock, teleoperate the robot to
explore the simulated Mars-like environment, and handle
unexpected situations, which included replacing and
repairing damaged solar panels outside the habitat, repairing
damage in air-ducts, and patching leaks in the system.
Six international teams from MIT, Cornell, the Universities of
Washington and Southern Denmark, and a private American
robotics team competed against ISI's Morpheus team.
Morpheus posted the highest score, 40, for five events. MIT
placed second with 37.
The award ceremony took place at the conference on Friday,
May 23. The conference is the largest of its kind in the
world. The technical program this year had
661 papers from more than 40 countries. Nearly 1300
people attended.
This year's ICRA conference was organized by Viterbi School
computer science faculty members. Associate Dean for
Research Maja Mataric' served as the conference general
chair, Professors Gaurav Sukhatme and Stefan Schaal as
the program chairs, and Professor Emeritus George Bekey
the honorary chair.
Images of the competition and competitors are at: http://picasaweb.google.com/weiminshen99/ICRA2008
and
http://picasaweb.google.com/harrischiu/ICRA2008
Morpheus: (from left) Mike Rubenstein,
Jacob Everist, Rizwan Khan, Behnam Salemi, Wei-min Shen
(advisor), Nadeesha Ranasinghe, Harris Chiu, Feili
Hou. |
