Student Branch Meeting 29.04.2009

On April 29th we will introduce two exciting future projects. One of them is going to be deployed in the next months.

This meeting takes place at: 
IBZ Tagungsraum (Internationales Begegnungszentrum TU Ilmenau). 
The meeting will start at 18.00. After the meeting is a comfortable barbecue at the BBQ area in front of the IBZ.

At this meeting we will discuss each project and decide wich one would be the best choice. There will be a short introduction to both projects and afterwards we will discuss both projects. The RoboCup@home is supported by the Neuroinformatics and Cognitive Robotics Lab and will be presented through a student wich has done a upper level course about this topic. The CaroloCup will be presented by one of our members, wich already done some research about this.



The CaroloCup is a competition for student teams developing and building their own autonomous model car at scale 1:10. It is inspired by DARPA Urban Challenge and provides simplified related competitions.

The competition takes place every february at Braunschweig University of Technology and features a reward of 10.000€.

The car has pass three missions:
- driving a circular track without obstacles
- driving a circular track with stationary obstacles
- parallel parking
The team has to present his conception to three main topics:
- production costs and energy balance
- parking concept
- concept automatic tracking and obstacle avoiding
These topics will be reviewed by a jury and compared with our competitors. 

At this competition only students and former students whose graduation is not more then six month in the past are allowed.  Topics to work on, are microcontrollers, feedback control systems, image processing and autonomous robotic task like path plannung and obstacle avoiding.



Robocup@home is a international competition wich aims to develop service and assistive robot technology with relevance for futere personal domestic applications. Everybody with an autonomous robot can participate. The competition consists of some tests and an open challenge to demonstrate the abilities of the robots. To participate in the open challenge the robot have to participate in at least one test. 

The ultimate scenario is the real world itself. To build up the required technologies gradually a basic home environment is provided as a general scenario. In the first years since 2006 it consisted of a living room and a kitchen but soon it also involves other areas of daily life, such as a garden/park area, a shop, a street or other public places. In 2009 the goal is to get a real supermarket setting to do some shopping.

One of the tests is an open challenge where freely chosen abilities can be shown. Also, in the open challenge proposals for future tests can be presented to the league.