ROCHESTER, MICHIGAN—Students in robotics, from electrical engineers to business majors, gathered at the 26th Annual Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition at Oakland University co-hosted by the U. S. Army Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center (TARDEC) June 1-4, 2018.
The competition pitches robotics teams from universities and colleges around the world against one another in a variety of autonomous-related events.
The four-day event includes three different competitions, an auto-navigation course, a design competition, and what’s called a, “Interoperable Profiles” competition.
The auto-navigation course requires a student-built vehicle to navigate a course lined with white paint guidelines and construction barrels, very much like a human driver does on a road. At one point along the course, the “road” disappears and the robot must rely on GPS waypoint navigation, before re-acquiring the road pattern and continuing on.
Bernard Theisen is a project manager with TARDEC’s Ground Vehicle Robotics group and has been involved with the competition for years.
“IGVC is the world’s largest international university ground robotics competition,” says Theisen. “It’s a fully-autonomous competition, which means once the students hit a button, the robot does all the rest.”
The design competition, originally started in cooperation with the Society of Automotive Engineers, SAE, brings students in front of a panel of design judges.
“It’s a great experience,” says Theisen. “I actually wish I knew more about this competition when I was a student, because I would have totally been here on the field, building the robot, participating.”
We have the ground part, which is called the auto-nav, where first the vehicle must navigate around the course much like a human driver does a road, then it goes to a GPS waypoint navigation point, then back to a road type course.
The other competition that we do, which was initially started with SAE, was the design competition, where the students have to present in front of a panel of judges to decide who has the best design.
There’s another competition we have called the IOP, or interoperable profiles, which is sort of the US Army’s ground robotics standards. It’s an optional competition which is usually sponsored by the PEO CS&CSS that kids can do where they can come in and test and see if they’re using the same standards that Army does. Most of those standards end up becoming SAE standards.”