European prize for Warwick rescue robot

A team of Engineering and Computer Science masters students from Warwick came away with the top prize at the prestigious RoboCup Rescue Championship that took place in Magdeberg, Germany last month.

The RoboCup contest was initiated nine years ago following the Great Hanshin earthquake which devastated the Japanese city of Kobe in 1995. Given the recent natural disasters in Haiti and Chile, the technologies exhibited in the competition have great relevance in the field of victim recovery in zones that are unsafe for human rescue workers.

From the 15th to the 18th of April, teams from all around Europe pitted their robots against one another in the hopes of winning the grand prize. Each team had the task of designing and building a robot suitable for large-scale rescue operations, which would be tested in a simulated disaster environment during the annual competition. The robots were judged on mobility, sensory perception, planning, mapping, and operator interfaces, while searching for simulated victims in a challenging environment.

Warwick’s student team won first place overall, as well as achieving the award for best in the mobility category. Although last year’s team had emerged victorious in the mobility category, this was the first year that a team from Warwick had won the entire competition. Their innovative design incorporated an arm with “four degrees of movement,” which allowed the winning team to carry out manoeuvres in restricted spaces without moving the whole robot.

While the competition does not award a cash prize, the trophy and the prestige that come from competing and winning at such a high level of engineering provided more than enough compensation for the Warwick team. Matt Winterbottom, one of the seven Engineering students who worked on the robot told the Boar:

“This was a fantastic experience for the team, to work on a project of this scale with real-world relevance. Being able to go to Germany and share our ideas with other European universities was great, and obviously winning the competition was an added bonus.”

Winterbottom added that the victory was especially sweet because last year’s winners, the University of Koblenz, had been tipped to win again in this year’s tournament.

The team’s academic project directors were Dr Peter Jones from the School of Engineering, and Professor Ken Young from the School of Engineering and the Warwick Manufacturing Group. Professor Young told Warwick Insite of his pride in the team, saying that he was “delighted at the students’ success,” and that their experience in the international competition would stand them in good stead for the “real world [of] engineering.”