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Robo-Magellan (Eddie)

[Official SRS Robo-Magellan information can be found at http://www.robothon.org/]

Preface

"Eddie" is the WSU Robotics Club Robo-Magellan entry. He Competed in the Seattle Robotics Society Roboton competition in 2005 and received the Judges Choice award at that event. He will be going back to Seattle in 2006 to compete again.

The WSU Robotics Club’s primary objective for the 2004-2005 term is to field an entry in the Seattle Robotics Society’s Robo-Magellan competition. Requiring the timely development and seamless integration of myriad mechanical, electrical, and software systems, this task will push the limits of our capabilities and demand the acquisition of substantial new knowledge and skills.


About the Competition

(The full rules and contest information may be found here: http://www.robothon.org/Robothon2004/challenge.html)

In the SRS Robo-Magellan competition, robotic participants will be required to autonomously navigate a complex outdoor environment in pursuit of a target waypoint (as designated by an orange traffic cone, which the robot must physically contact, but not perturb). Reaching this objective in a timely fashion is critical to the robot’s success. Additionally, however, there will be several auxiliary waypoints that serve as beneficial score modifiers (to what extent they modify ones score will depend on the difficulty associated with reaching them).

The environment alone will pose many potential hazards, which will be difficult to fully predict prior to the competition. Since the contest will be held in one of the park areas around the popular Seattle Center, it can be expected that obstacles may range from mundane rocks to trickier objects like park benches and fountains, all the way up to mobile threats posed by people merely observing the contest.

A few restrictions are placed on the physical characteristics of the robot, which must be fully considered in the design process. First and foremost, the robot cannot weigh in excess of fifty pounds (this aspect will undoubtedly require the most painstaking evaluation on our part), nor can it exceed the bounds of a four foot cube at any time. Of lesser concern, is that the robot must not employ any form of internal or external combustion engine (this is not of significant interest to us, as we intend to use a purely electrical locomotion scheme).


The WSU Entry

Our entry in the SRS Robo-Magellan event will represent the efficient collaboration of individuals from mechanical, electrical, and software engineering backgrounds. It will be built from the ground-up with an emphasis on exploring new technologies and solution approaches so as to broaden our horizons, while at the same time developing a competitive and highly extensible robotics platform.

We have partitioned this project into three discrete categories (ordered by their completion priority - although development in all fields is happening concurrently), which will be individually detailed:

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