Mechanical engineering students completed a three-day competition last month that made them the top student team for designing and building autonomous ground vehicles. The Virginia Tech Autonomous Vehicle Team outperformed other entrants at the international event, winning eight out of nine judged categories and $15,000 for the team.
Military, corporate and academic sponsors, including the U.S. Department of Defense and the Air Force Research Laboratory, held the annual Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition in Traverse City, Mich., where 12 Hokies collected the top three awards for overall performance on June 13.
Alfred Wicks, professor of mechanical engineering and one of the team’s faculty advisers, explained what makes a robot autonomous.
“There is no remote control,” he said. “The vehicle is designed and programmed by students and navigates its way through the competition without intervention, except in a case where we need to do an emergency stop on the vehicle.”
Wicks said students from the team competed in three sections. Judges rated them in the autonomous challenge as their robots sojourned through an obstacle course complete with barrels and ramps; in the design competition through oral and written reports and judging by competition officials; and in the navigation challenge, where the vehicles avoided more obstacles to reach programmed waypoints via GPS sensors.
The top three machines competing in each of these sections received titles for their performance, of which Hokies received all but one.
Tech students entered three vehicles into the Michigan competition, named Gemini, Polaris and Johnny-5. While some modified and enhanced last year’s hardware for Gemini and Johnny-5, others built Polaris from scratch as their senior design project for the Department of Mechanical Engineering.
Sean Baity, one of three graduate advisers who mentored students through the design and construction process, explained why the group was successful.
“A key to our success is keeping people around for each successive year,” he said. “As a part of the year-long course, we try to keep log books and design manuals for next year’s competition.”
Wicks said student volunteers from the Mechanical Engineering Department and other disciplines were not only welcome but also encouraged to join the team. One student who volunteered his freshman year was a member of the group four years prior to last month’s competition.
Each of the three vehicles uses special software developed by National Instruments, the team’s corporate sponsor, to assess input from sensors and maneuver the robots. Baity said the software provides a simple graphical interface that does not rely on line-by-line code or difficult programming. Other schools at the competition, but not all of them, used the program.
This was not the first year Tech students dominated the international competition. In 1998 and 2000 the team won the challenge, later scoring best overall and nabbing six of nine titles in last year’s competition.
According the Intelligent Ground Vehicles Competition’s website, the technologies involved in the competition “come from a wide range of disciplines and are those of great current interest in both industry and engineering education.” Research from the competition benefits a wide range of disciplines, including engineering, computer science, military mobility, intelligent transportation systems and manufacturing.
Teams from American, Canadian and Japanese schools brought 37 autonomous vehicles to the 13th annual installment of the competition. A University of Central Florida robot named Calculon was the only vehicle able to outdo Gemini, Polaris or Johnny-5 for one of the nine awards.
Wicks said the students’ accomplishments impressed him.
“Some of the graduate students came back with ideas to improve the vehicles, but we’ve got to the point that it’s hard to improve what we already have,” he said.
Because the vehicles are designed by the effort and imagination of students, the team will not upgrade or build new robots for next summer’s competition until the regular academic year begins.
