Intrepid, Mark Curry's autonomous robot, won first prize at the Robothon 2007 RoboMagellan competition, held at the Seattle Center this year. RoboMagellan requires autonomous robots (no remote control) to negotiate between a number of traffic cones, touching each, without human intervention. This requires various kinds of sensors to keep track of where it is and where it's trying to go, negotiate obstacles and find the target orange cones. Usually, three attempted runs are allowed. (click on the pix for bigger ones)  Team members hard at work in the pit, entering GPS coordinates for the cones.  Missed it - can we make it back to the starting point? The first run avoided a nasty obstacle but arrived short of the far target cone and could not see it. GPS uncertainty was likely the problem. This is a frequent difficulty and is inherent in the accuracy of the GPS system. After moving to several locations in the vicinity, Intrepid was unable to spot the cone, so it turned around and finished the rest of the course successfully. The second run was a disaster - Intrepid ran into a stealth obstacle (a low-SCS metal bench edge that nearly flipped it backwards) and had to be aborted. But round three, just when it was looking like all was lost...  "What's it doing?" "Shhhh! Its thinking!" Intrepid managed to pick out the cone from a great distance away. It couldn't have seen more than a few pixels of orange. But at last...bingo!  There were actually two more "bonus" waypoints, but they were ridiculously difficult. One required finding and descending an edgeless ramp down into the big fountain (just visible below), avoiding randomly falling water (you'd need an amphibious vehicle) and finding its way back out again. The other required negotiating a labyrinth of steps and falls over edges of borderless sidewalks. No one even tried to negotiate them.  Completion of the winning run to round of applause. Mark is being congradulated by the competition director while Tina is ever hard at work.
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