ORLANDO, Fla.—Students interested in building and programming robots to operate both in virtual and real-world environments are invited to participate in the Robotics Competition to be held as part of the 2007 Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference.

The Tapia 2007 Conference will take place October 14-17, 2007 in Orlando, Florida with the theme of “Passion in Computing – Diversity in Innovation.” Although this is the fourth conference in the series, 2007 marks the first time the Robotics Competition will be held. High school, undergraduate, and graduate students are encouraged to participate in the competition. Each team should have a faculty advisor and can have up to four students.

The competition is adapted from a class taught by Chad Jenkins, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Brown University in which students program robots to perform search-and-rescue types of tasks. Jenkins is co-chairing the competition with Jeff Forbes, Assistant Professor of the Practice of Computer Science at Duke University.

“The two-stage competition will involve simulated and physical disaster environments where the goal is to identify and locate a number of different objects,” said Forbes. “For the first stage, teams will use Player software to program a virtual robot to seek out objects in a Gazebo-rendered environment. For the second stage, each team will field a iRobot® Create  robot equipped with a camera and touch sensors to locate objects in an environment created at the conference hotel.”

The competition involves programming a mobile robot to autonomously search for and visit a number of marked but unknown locations (or “survivors”) in a given environment. Upon identifying and reaching each survivor, a robot should make a simulated call for help. The qualification stage will be conducted in the Player/Stage/Gazebo simulation environment, with submissions due August 15, 2007. Player is a client/server system originally developed at the University of Southern California for managing robot control. Gazebo then simulates and renders the robots in a three-dimensional world. Robot clients can be written in any computer language supported by Player, such as C/C++, Java, and Python. Teams that register their intent to participate at http://www.cs.duke.edu/csed/tapia07/register.html will receive a DVD that includes the development environment for the qualification stage.

All participants who meet a minimum criterion will be invited to compete in the next stage of the competition conducted during the Tapia conference. Competitors will port their Player clients to control an iRobot® Create robot that is outfitted with a camera for the competition, Although students will be provided with advance maps showing the locations of walls and certain reference points, the actual start locations of each robot and various objects will not be revealed until five minutes prior to each trial.

More information about the Robotics Competition, and links to a number of resources, can be found at http://www.cs.duke.edu/csed/tapia07/. Faculty and students with questions are invited to write to robotics@richardtapia.org.

 

Important dates

Simulator release: May 15, 2007
Intent to participate & distribution of qualification materials: through Wednesday, Aug. 1, 2007
Submission of qualification material: Aug. 15, 2007
Notification of qualification: Sept. 1, 2007

About the Tapia Conference Series

The Tapia Conference series honors the significant contributions of Richard A. Tapia, a mathematician and professor in the Department of Computational and Applied Mathematics at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He is internationally known for his research in computational and mathematical sciences and is a national leader in education and outreach programs. Tapia has authored or co-authored two books and more than 80 mathematical research papers. His current positions at Rice are University Professor; Maxfield-Oshman Professor in Engineering; and Director, Center for Excellence and Equity in Education.

The Tapia conference series enjoys the support of a number of academic, research and business organizations, including Google, Microsoft, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Texas A&M University, the National Center for Women and Information Technology, Auburn University, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign School of Computer Science, IBM, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Tufts University and Georgetown University. For more information about the different levels of support and the associated benefits, go to: http://www.richardtapia.org/2007/supporters.php.

For more information about the Tapia 2007 Conference, visit the Web site at http://www.richardtapia.org/2007/ or write to info@richardtapia.org.

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