Dipak Chatterjee, the principal of IEM said, “Robotics is usually associated with countries like Japan and the US. It was only because of the effort of our faculty that we could organise the programme and saw the participation of over 5,000 students”. Students from 200 different institutions, including IIT Kharagpur, IIT Mumbai, and NIT Jamshedpur among others, displayed a number of robots such MERP (Mobile Exploration Robotics Platform), a robotic arm, micro robots and utility robots in the competition.

“We have worked tirelessly for three months to organise this competition. We are thrilled to have received such a huge response from the students. Students from different states have come and actually stayed here for the programme,” said Manish Gupta, a 4th year student of IEM.

FIRST has various programs, starting with one for children as young as six who build with LEGOs, up to the top level, the robotics competition for high school kids. The teams purchase a set of basic parts, then improvise and build a robot to compete in a game with rules that change every year. No one knows what the rules will be until they receive their kit, cutting down the advantage veteran teams have over rookies.

FIRST has various programs, starting with one for children as young as six who build with LEGOs, up to the top level, the robotics competition for high school kids. The teams purchase a set of basic parts, then improvise and build a robot to compete in a game with rules that change every year. No one knows what the rules will be until they receive their kit, cutting down the advantage veteran teams have over rookies.

Thus, while addressing the office cleanup task, we are attempting to build up "generic " skills and RAPs that can be reused as building blocks in RAPs for future tasks. CHIP went into the clean-up competition with a general-purpose strategy for cleaning up a room. The strategy, broadly, was to scan an entire area systematically, and as collectible objects were identified, pick them up and deposit them in the nearest appropriate receptacle. This plan for cleaning up a room is built up from a collection of more general purpose operations, such as `find-object-type’, `move-to-target’, and `pick-up-target’. In this sense, only CHIP’s highest level goals were programmed specifically for the IJCAI event; the rest are generic and are the building blocks for CHIP’s future behavior.

” The audience for this is breadth, including professional, hobbyist, and academic developers - and all are eligible to compete and win real robots. MSRDS 2008 is .NET based, so between people having pre-existing .NET skills and simulation reducing the costs of entry, this is available to most people,” Fiessinger added.

Animate Agent Project, aimed at understanding the software architecture and knowledge representations needed to build a general-purpose robotic assistant. CHIP’s strategy for the Office Cleanup event of the 1995 Robot Competition and Exhibition was to scan an entire area systematically and, as collectible objects were identified, pick them up and deposit them in the nearest appropriate receptacle.

This article describes CHIP and its various systems and the ways in which these elements combined to produce an effective entry to the robot competition. The University of Chicago’s robot, CHIP, is part of the Animate Agent Project aimed at understanding the software architecture and knowledge representations needed to build a general purpose robotic assistan.

Amaze (a mind-bending maze), Mars Rover, Urban (downtown driving), Robot Rescue, Sumo and Tournament are the simulated environments made available to challengers. Essentially, competitors will have to download the necessary software tools made available by Microsoft, choose a specific challenge and write the code that will make a robot complete it. In this initial stage of the competition, contestants will not need actual hardware, as all the environments are virtual. However, the finals at the PDC in October 2008 will require a hardware infrastructure, but Microsoft will take care of this detail by offering a CoroBot to the winner of the competition.

“RoboChamps is built on top of the Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio (MSRDS) 2008 CTP, and uses that product’s robust, physics enabled simulation environment to remove the barriers of entry that exist for many today.

Autodesk, Inc. is a Fortune 1000 company, wholly focused on ensuring that great ideas are turned into reality. With seven million users, Autodesk is the world’s leading software and services company for the manufacturing, infrastructure, building, media and entertainment, and wireless data services fields. Autodesk?s solutions help customers create, manage and share their data and digital assets more effectively.  As a result, customers turn ideas into competitive advantage, become more productive, streamline project efficiency and maximize profits.

This year’s competition involves a much different challenge. Each car must autonomously traverse 60 miles of challenging urban traffic conditions, demonstrating maneuvers such as stopping at an intersection, merging with traffic, parallel parking, avoiding debris or obstacles in the road, and obeying traffic laws like right-of-way, all while avoiding collisions with the other cars traveling on the course (including one built from a giant industrial dump truck that, with even a slight bump, could incapacitate Tommy Jr.)

To do all that, Tommy Jr. relies on advanced software from Perrone that amalgamates several data streams supplied by the car’s military-grade Global Positioning System, four laser range finders and a radar, so that the car can “see” up to 250 feet in all directions with precision of up to half an inch.

This navigational system enables Tommy Jr. to recognize road lanes, intersections and obstacles like construction cones and other vehicles; the Perrone software dictates how to respond to the myriad possible conditions.  Team Jefferson will learn Aug. 10 whether it has made it through the regional qualifying stage to the national competition, which will involve national qualifying events held at the end of October that will culminate in a final race on Nov. 3, all held in a not-yet-disclosed location.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the research and development wing of the Department of Defense, sponsors the Challenge as part of the Pentagon’s effort to comply with a congressional mandate requiring one-third of military ground vehicles to be unmanned by 2015.

To do all that, Tommy Jr. relies on advanced software from Perrone that amalgamates several data streams supplied by the car’s military-grade Global Positioning System, four laser range finders and a radar, so that the car can “see” up to 250 feet in all directions with precision of up to half an inch. This navigational system enables Tommy Jr. to recognize road lanes, intersections and obstacles like construction cones and other vehicles; the Perrone software dictates how to respond to the myriad possible conditions.

Team Jefferson will learn Aug. 10 whether it has made it through the regional qualifying stage to the national competition, which will involve national qualifying events held at the end of October that will culminate in a final race on Nov. 3, all held in a not-yet-disclosed location.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the research and development wing of the Department of Defense, sponsors the Challenge as part of the Pentagon’s effort to comply with a congressional mandate requiring one-third of military ground vehicles to be unmanned by 2015.