I'll explain what ours does before I post pictures. Basically its a fully autonamous mobile robot which navigates outdoors using GPS, infra red, ultrasonic, tactile sensors and a wi-fi based positioning engine. It has two standard wheel chair motors to provide differential drive and a single large castor at the rear. The chassis is made of aluminium sheets and a modular structural system type stuff. It runs using WinXP on a mini-ITX motherboard with a 600mhz processor and powers itself from a pair of car batteries.
Now the pictures:
This is just the front of the robot, the metal panels with the Ekahau and Thales logos (our sponsors) are bump sensors to detect collisions.
This is a top down view inside the robot with some of the chassis removed, you can see all the batteries and electrical stuff at the back and the computer at the front.
Heres a view of the backside of the robot along with my team leader staring blankly into space and a couple of other team members working in the background. You can see the safety tether (the cable with the gray box) that we use to stop the robot if it goes out of control (which happens alot).
Lastly heres a blurry picture of the robot outside in the middle of the night doing some testing, the person holding the laptop (my girlfriend) is controlling the code on the robot remotely through bluetooth and testing the various sensors. Also you can see I added a bunch of case modding lights to the insides of the robot to make it look cool.
As for the actual competition, the robots had to navigate through a series of GPS waypoints across the campus, whichever did it fastest would win. However GPS drift foiled all of the robots on the day except ours which has a cunningly designed filter to deal with erroneous GPS info. But later in the day another team got a similar filter working and managed to make a timed run which got about 10 feet closer to the end than we had before crashing, but they did get alot fo penalties on the way there for collisions so we may still be in 1st place.
