Inexus International Robotics Challenge (Techfest 2011)
robot / wireless / automation
I was the leader of a team of Swinburne students, which has developed a multi-robot system that won them first place at the national iNexus Robot Competition and second place at the world final in Mumbai, India.
The competition set teams the challenge of replicating a manned spacecraft mission called Mars Manouevre. A manual robot (the spacecraft) must land on Mars and send out a swarm of autonomous robots to collect rock samples (blocks) that are then brought back to the spacecraft in a specified order. The team built a manual robot that could act as the main command point as well as an autonomous robot tasked with going out onto the grid and bringing back blocks. The key was to ensure that the manual and autonomous robots were able to cooperate and collaborate in performing their respective tasks.
The autonomous robots are built based on the Atmel Atmega128 microcontroller, equipped with a Xbee wireless transceiver for inter-robot communication and various infrared sensors to detect and recognize the correct boxes.
