Robotics competition underway

National Instruments Oceania has announced the competing teams for the inaugural National Instruments Autonomous Robotics Competition, a student robotics competition designed to encourage development and innovation in the field of robotics.

The 2011 competition, which is running now and ends in September, will feature teams representing the country’s top universities, with each team developing an autonomous robot that will ultimately compete in a live competition with the aim of autonomously completing a set of predefined tasks in the shortest time, while earning the most points.

Students will be able to work with NI engineers throughout the process and compete at the live competition in September, which will attract a large audience from industry and academia and provide a great opportunity for the students to showcase their talents.

Teams from the following universities will be competing in the competition:

Curtin University; Macquarie University; Queensland University of Technology; Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology; Swinburne University of Technology; University of Adelaide; University of New South Wales; University of Sydney; University of Tasmania; University of Technology Sydney.

The application areas of focus for this year's competition will be navigation, obstacle avoidance and object handling. Each team has received a development kit featuring an NI CompactRIO embedded acquisition and control system and the LabVIEW 2010 Robotics Suite for developing their autonomous robot. Maxon Motor has also provided each team with a gift voucher for purchase of Maxon Motors.

All teams that successfully complete the competition, regardless of their finishing position, will keep the development kit. There is also a first prize of $3000 and a runners-up prize of $1500.

Training, mentoring and competition objectives will also be provided by NI Application Engineers who specialise in robotics applications.

To learn more about the 2011 NI Autonomous Robotics Competition, visit: www.ni.com/oceania/ni-arc.