Tsukuba Challenge 2009

Hello readers, this time we have an entry wrote by Peshala, member of our lab and member of the team that participated in the competition.

This time we would like to share our experience at "Real World Robot Challenge 2009", which is also referred to as the "Tsukuba Challenge".

The New Technology Foundation holds Tsukuba Challenge in Tsukuba City (Ibaraki prefecture, Japan) every year, which is a mobile robot contest to spur innovation and encourage research on outdoor autonomous navigation. The challenge is to cover a distance of 1 km along a predefined course by an autonomous mobile robot in the presence of pedestrians and cyclists. The track is one used by people in their everyday life and is not being modified in anyway for robot navigation. To qualify for the final, the mobile robots should pass a trial qualifying event with a distance of 140m.

Among 72 teams from various universities, research institutes and individuals, 34 teams made it to the final including our team. An unexpected problem came in the way in the final challenge and our robot only navigated 192m in 12 minutes. Our robot got stuck in amidst of an area full of fallen leaves and we had to announce retirement.

Five teams managed to clear the goal in the final.

Here are some of the photos of our robot from the real event.

 

 

In the right column of the blog you can find the link to the official site as well as the official route.

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