A team of electrical and computer engineering students from the University of Houston recently took the top trophy at a robotics competition at Oklahoma State University (OSU) for their creation of a remote bot that performed a myriad of commands – in the dark.
The competition was the 2015 Mercury Remote Robot Challenge hosted by OSU in Stillwater, Oklahoma. The Mercury Remote Robot Challenge is an international, interscholastic robotics competition. Each year, Mercury Robotics challenges competitors to design and build a robot capable of performing a mission. The robot must be operated remotely over the Internet from at least 50 miles away. This presents an interesting engineering challenge in which electrical and mechanical design, embedded programming, wireless communication, and latency all play a large role.
The UH team was composed of Erick Saucedo, Steven Do and Aman Fatma and their advisor Julius Marpaung, instructional faculty member in the electrical and computer engineering department. The team’s robot, “Cougar Paws,” was designed to navigate in total darkness. Its tasks were to capture a golf ball, climb and descend 30 degree inclines and deposit to ball at a specific destination. In addition to these actions, the robot also needed to demonstrate speed in sprinting to the finish line on the last part of the track.
In order to be declared the 2015 Mercury Remote Robot Challenge Champion, Cougar Paws also had to illustrate the capability of recognizing and acting on Loss of Signal (LOS). LOS is the condition that prevents the robot from receiving commands from the operator due to a network problem (not related to the robot system).
The UH team took home the first place prize with the highest score in the competition. Fellow competitors come both from local schools like the University of Texas and the University of Oklahoma, but also internationally from countries like Mexico, Colombia and Brazil.