10 December 1998

Mobile Robots Hustle Through Maze to Win Carnegie Mellon Robot Programming Contest, Then Beat Human Challengers

A team of two R2D2-sized mobile robots decked out in gold chains and hats hustled through a 500-square-foot maze in record time to find five helium-filled balloons and capture first place in Carnegie Mellon University's annual Mobile Robot Programming Contest. After that, they took on two human challengers and beat them as well.

The winning robot team, named Pimpbot after a comedic character on the NBC talk show "Late Night with Conan O'Brien," http://www.nbc.com/conan/, beat out eight other challengers with a time of four minutes and 30 seconds. The runner up, Mighty Mouse, found the balloons in five minutes.

The contest is the culmination of a basic course in the university's robotics doctoral program, developed and taught by Illah Nourbakhsh, an assistant professor in the Robotics Institute who started the contests in 1993 when he was a student at Stanford University. "The grand finale of the competition came when Pimpbot beat the humans," said Nourbakhsh. "For the first time in all the years I have done this, the robots won! Pimpbot beat humans at the game five balloons to three!"

Pimpbot was programmed and outfitted by Daniel Robinson and Rahul Bhargava, who are juniors majoring in electrical and computer engineering, and Ira Fay, a junior in computer science. Bhargava explained how the programming course unfolded. At the beginning of the semester, students wrote basic code to get a robot moving and turning. They followed that with code enabling the two robots to navigate through known mazes.

"The challenge was to put the robot in the middle of a rectangular maze it knew nothing about and have it find its way to a goal," Bhargava said. "The contest was the culmination of all the work we had done throughout the semester. Using radio modems, we were able to implement cooperation and communication between the robots--one of the hottest fields in robotics research. We also experimented with speech synthesis and even taught Pimpbot to speak jive."

In the future the Pimpbot team members hope to continue their robotics research by developing an autonomous mapping system which a robot will use to navigate. "We also hope to develop interactive robotic activities that will involve the public and increase awareness about this exciting field," Bhargava said.

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