Critical last blog post from Janindu Sithumini Arukgoda, Centre for Autonomous Systems (CAS) PhD student with Team VICTOR, the Virginia Tech Grand Challenge entry for the 2017 Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge (MBZIRC).
The competition begins on 16 March so here is the view from the test field:
UAE is so hot!!!
Especially with such a sudden change in climate from Virginia to Abu Dhabi! But it was only 32°C in the middle of day in the middle of the desert - not as bad as summer in Sydney!
Condition changes do affect systems, but we did plan for them so right now are tuning ours. The temperature difference doesn't itself really make any immediate impacts (except for us!), but the brightness of the sun has caused some issues with our image processing and computer vision algorithms.
Obviously, no one in Team Victor is getting a lot of sleep and we are all running on highly concentrated doses of caffeine. Right now, we get up at 5.30am for tests at 7am, until 7pm. But this is the last lap of a long preparation and we want to give our 100%. We can relax once the competition is over but the only downside is that we can’t enjoy the nice hotel, and especially the pool.
The UTS undergrad team is here now and a huge help, lending a hand wherever/whenever possible. We’ve met the University of Tokyo team in the airfield and our tent is next to the teams from Carnegie Mellon, ETH Zurich and KAIST (the winner of Darpa Robotics Challenge) so we will be meeting up with them too!
There is a friendly rivalry going, as we all have different approaches to solve the same problem and really are very keen on learning from other. Some of the finest minds in the field of robotics are competing here, and there is a lot that we can learn from them.
Rehearsals on the competition site started on 14 March, and a few issues have been identified. Including a UAV crash…
Team leader Dr Tomonari Furukawa says that while some people are happy with results/amendments so far in Challenge 2:
“All the software people were serious instead. This is a competition of full autonomy, and now is the time that the software people demonstrate the efficacy of their system.”
So no pressure!