For the second year in a row, the IEEE-UAH Student Branch has independently fielded an entry into the Student Hardware Competition of the IEEE Region III annual conference.

This year's competition was loosely based on the Trinity firefighting Robot Competition held every year at Trinity College. The objective of the IEEE competition was for each team of students to build a small, autonomous robot, which could navigate a simple maze and locate a "candle." The candle, which was actually an array of LED's, was extinguished by placing a Dixie cup over it.

Schools from all across the Region competed this year. In all, twenty-six universities showed up to showcase their designs. The usuals of UAH, Tennessee Tech, UAB, and Kentucky were there along with a few new faces. (Perhaps the locale of this year's conference had something to do with that?)

Despite beautiful beaches, majestic sunsets, and all inclusive room packages, the IEEE-UAH team was able to fight there way to a seventh place finish this year. "We expected to do much better" says team member Aaron Brown, "But I don't think a few of our electronic systems liked the x-ray machines at the airport very much." (Certainly one of the drawbacks of having the competition on a Caribbean island.)

Finishing first at this year's competition were the Bulldogs of Mississippi State. Their robot, which wasn't even fully functional the first round, took a simple approach to navigating by using line following with some COTS line sensor units and wall sensing via SRF04 sonars. The deciding factor on their system, however, was the CMUCam they used to actually find and navigate up to the candle. MSU was the first to get all the bugs worked out of their system and they did so with enough competition left to secure victory.

Notably, the most consistent characteristic of all the robots at this year's competition was the variety of designs. Although all the entries were built and programmed to accomplish the same task and were approximately the same size, that is where the similarities ended. The processors used included the venerable Basic Stamp and PIC micro controllers, the OOPic (by Huntsville native Scott Savage), the LEGO Brainstem, and the TI MSP430. Locomotion was achieved using the standard assortment of DC servomotors and stepper motors. (Currently, rumor has it that next year's competition will be outdoors. Perhaps non-electric motors, which use combustable materials, will be allowed?) Sensors included sonars, IR range finders, and photo trans/resistors among many others.

The IEEE-UAH team sported a couple of original technologies to this year's competition. The first was the use of the new MSP430 MCU from TI. This unit, which is orders of magnitude faster than PIC based controllers, has hardware support for many common robotic tasks and also has the advantage of a skilled and engineering educated user base. The model used by the IEEE-UAH team, the F149, contributed six I/O ports, hardware supported PWM generators, two hardware timers, and more interrupts than needed. The ease of programming and debugging (via JTAG) and small size (PQFP) allowed the team to concentrate on other areas of development.

Another technology the Charger team implemented was a 1/3" RS-170 video camera. Building on the knowledge of last year's entry, the IEEE-UAH team was able to integrate an actual video camera into their system. Using the camera gave them the advantage of being able to gather large amounts of data in a very short period of time. Upon successful processing of a video field (which isn't exactly trivial), data about the robot's surroundings could be gathered and passed along to the navigation routine much more quickly than by implementing standard one dimensional sensors.

For more information on the IEEE-UAH Student Branch and IEEE-UAH projects, visit http://ieee.uah.edu.