UQ students set to tackle world championships with baseball-firing robots

Four UQ students and their two environmentally-friendly, baseball-firing robots will represent Australia at one of the world's major robotic championships in Japan on March 5.

The Robocon 2000 Annual Asian Robotics Championship showcases the engineering skills of undergraduate students. UQ students will form the only Australian team, competing against entrants from Japan, China, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines and France.

Each team must design and build two robots for the competition: one capable of carrying and being controlled by a person; the other a small autonomous robot. The robots must collect and fire rubber baseballs to knock over upright targets, competing against two robots from an opposing team in three-minute matches. The competition is filmed before a live audience and broadcast nationally.

The UQ robot entries, Festobot and Junk Tank, were designed to comply with strict weight and size specifications and built using large amounts of discarded material.

"Our robots made heavy use of any materials we found lying around - this makes our robots particularly environmentally friendly and has also helped to keep costs down," said mechanical engineering postgraduate and UQ team head Greg Campbell.

"We have been particularly innovative in finding resources. For example, we have used old air compressors to make drive motors for our autonomous vehicles and we have used surplus electric wheelchair motors for drive propulsion. We have also scavenged equipment from the robots of the previous two years."

The large manual control robot was named Festobot in honour of the team's only non-university sponsor, FESTO, and the small autonomous robot earned the name Junk Tank because it used up to 40 percent recycled and surplus material.

"The word ?Tank' is because this vehicle crawls, spins and fires similar to a tank. At almost 16kg, it is also very heavy and solidly built, and any other robot coming into contact with it is likely to come off second best," Mr Campbell said.

The team, 3rd Iteration, includes Mr Campbell, Fiona Cowan (fourth-year electrical engineering/Arts), Damien Kee (third-year electrical engineering), Llewellyn Mann (third-year mechanical and space engineering) and Skye Creedon (third-year civil engineering).

Mr Campbell said the team overcame many difficulties in the design process to arrive at some "extremely innovative solutions". The students gave up their evenings and weekends to work on the robots during the crucial construction phase, balancing the load with work experience commitments.

For more information, contact the UQ Communications Office (telephone 3365 2619).