KSU's Teams at the AAAI96 Robotics Contest

Three teams from the CIS department at KSU partiticipated in the 5th Annual AAAI Robotics Contest in Portland, Or from Aug 3 through Aug 8, 1996. The students had a great time and did well in the contest.
  • The contest was held at the Portland Convention Center. a view of contest site another view of contest site The competition included many schools.
  • After a long drive, everyone set up to work and talk the work space in the competition hall more setup even more

    Team 1

    Kansas State University Team 1 consisted of computer science undergraduates Mike Novak and Darrel Fossett. They used a Nomad200 robot from Nomadic Technology. Their code was written in C++ using the Linux operating system on a 486 processor. Sonar was used for navigation and feature recognition, and vision was used for determining occupancy of the conference rooms. The robot scanned the conference room in multiple directions looking for movement. They used multiple threads to allow monitoring of alignment and obstacle avoidance concurrently with other control tasks. Their program re-aligned the robot to the hallway whenever the walls allowed accurate positioning. They completed the task in less than 10 minutes with a perfect score. Team 1 tied for second place in the contest. view of competiton. another view of competiton.

    Team 2

    Kansas State University Team 2 consisted of Tom Peterson, John Pruner, and Jon Newton. Members of the team that could not attend the conference included Mike Burgoon and Keith Holcomb. Team 2 also used the Nomad200 robot and their code was written in C++ using the Linux operating system. They use sonar for all tasks, including navigation, feature recognition, and room-occupancy detection. They did not use threads. They successfully used sonar from the hallway to detect movement in the conference rooms. Their design was involved a minimalistic approach to the task. They completed the task in less than 10 minutes with only a penalty for not entering the conference rooms. Team 2 tied for third place in the contest.

    Team 3

    Kansas State University Team 3 consisted of Pawel Oscizko and Todd Prater. Their code for the Nomad200 robot was also written in C++ using the Linux operating system. Difficulties with re-entering the final room prevented their competition in the final round.
  • Alan Alda was there to film the contest for a future Frontiers of Scientific American show Alan Alda more Alan Alda
  • After the final event, everyone gathered to celebrate and relax. Toasting more celebrating more celebrating more celebrating
  • Some people could not stay out of the water fountain Pawel in the water