We're now recruiting for our 2005/2006 campaign!

The team consists of approximately 15 to 20 students from the various engineering disciplines. You will be designing, building, coding for, and debugging intelligent autonomous soccer robots with a miniature PC on each of them. We take a systems approach in designing and so the entire system can be split up in 4 major parts:

• Electromechanical Design: Design, build, and test the robot hardware: drive, kicker, dribbling system and chassis. Since there are very few regulations on what the robot can look like, the designers have a lot of freedom to come up with a high performance solution. We machine all our parts in house, so you'll get the opportunity to learn how to use a CNC mill/lathe.
• Electrical Design: Design the interface between AI and all the actuators, e.g. wireless communication between a computer and the robots, digital I/O and analog circuits to drive our actuators. This also includes motor control. For the first time we will need inter-robot communication, probably using blue-tooth.
• Strategy: Our robots will be cooperating agents with distributed intelligence. Writing the strategy entails algorithms, optimization, networking, real-time trajectory generation and control, possibly machine learning, etc. It is an open ended problem and so the solutions are manifold.
• Machine Vision: Localize the robots by their colored markers in real-time at 60 Hz. Includes color segmentation, blob recognition and filtering. Other areas of interest are constant self-calibration and robot tracking. This year we will try putting cameras on the robots, which will lead to some nice research problems.

This project fulfills the MEng project requirement, the Systems Engineering project requirement and the Senior undergraduate design elective.

We are usually open to taking on motivated, talented, and experienced people. If you are interested, first contact one of the following to verify that they are still seeking people:

ECE: Mike McCabe mfm8@cornell.edu

MechE: Mike Sherback mas61@cornell.edu

CS/Algorithms: Gene Byrne eeb26@cornell.edu

The Application Process

The application process has 2 stages. First, you have to turn in the application form and an unofficial transcript (slide them under the door of 106 Rhodes). The group leader will set up an interview if things look good.