The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing
June 01, 2007
Tapia Conference Hosts Robotics Competition for Students
1 | 2 All »
ORLANDO, Fla., May 30 -- Students interested in building and programming robots to operate both in virtual and real-world environments are invited to participate in the Robotics Competition to be held as part of the 2007 Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference.
The Tapia 2007 Conference will take place October 14-17, 2007 in Orlando, Florida with the theme of "Passion in Computing - Diversity in Innovation." Although this is the fourth conference in the series, 2007 marks the first time the Robotics Competition will be held. High school, undergraduate, and graduate students are encouraged to participate in the competition. Each team should have a faculty advisor and can have up to four students.
The competition is adapted from a class taught by Chad Jenkins, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Brown University in which students program robots to perform search-and-rescue types of tasks. Jenkins is co-chairing the competition with Jeff Forbes, Assistant Professor of the Practice of Computer Science at Duke University.
"The two-stage competition will involve simulated and physical disaster environments where the goal is to identify and locate a number of different objects," said Forbes. "For the first stage, teams will use Player software to program a virtual robot to seek out objects in a Gazebo-rendered environment. For the second stage, each team will field a iRobot Create robot equipped with a camera and touch sensors to locate objects in an environment created at the conference hotel."
The competition involves programming a mobile robot to autonomously search for and visit a number of marked but unknown locations (or "survivors") in a given environment. Upon identifying and reaching each survivor, a robot should make a simulated call for help. The qualification stage will be conducted in the Player/Stage/Gazebo simulation environment, with submissions due August 15, 2007. Player is a client/server system originally developed at the University of Southern California for managing robot control. Gazebo then simulates and renders the robots in a three-dimensional world. Robot clients can be written in any computer language supported by Player, such as C/C++, Java, and Python. Teams that register their intent to participate at http://www.cs.duke.edu/csed/tapia07/register.html will receive a DVD that includes the development environment for the qualification stage.
All participants who meet a minimum criterion will be invited to compete in the next stage of the competition conducted during the Tapia conference. Competitors will port their Player clients to control an iRobot Create robot that is outfitted with a camera for the competition, Although students will be provided with advance maps showing the locations of walls and certain reference points, the actual start locations of each robot and various objects will not be revealed until five minutes prior to each trial.
More information about the Robotics Competition, and links to a number of resources, can be found at http://www.cs.duke.edu/csed/tapia07/. Faculty and students with questions are invited to write to robotics@richardtapia.org.
Important dates
Simulator release: May 15, 2007
Intent to participate & distribution of qualification materials: through Wednesday, Aug. 1, 2007
Submission of qualification material: Aug. 15, 2007
Notification of qualification: Sept. 1, 2007
About the Tapia Conference Series
Page: 1 of 21 | 2 All »
Article Tools
Share Options
(Digg, Technorati, more)
Subscribe
Sponsored Links
RSS Feeds
Feeds by Topic
- Applications
- Developer Tools
- Interconnects
- Middleware
- Networks
- Processors
- Storage
- Systems
- Visualization
Feeds by Industry
Feeds by Content Type
Feature Articles
TeraGrid '09: Student Participation Soars
There was a new energy at this year's TeraGrid '09 conference thanks to an outstanding turnout for the student program. Thanks to support from the National Science Foundation, more than 100 high school, undergraduate and graduate students were able to participate in the conference.
Read More...
TeraGrid '09: OSG and TeraGrid Collaboration
Paul Avery, a recognized leader in advanced grid and networking for science, delivered the first keynote address at the recent TeraGrid '09 conference in Arlington, Virginia. A professor of physics at the University of Florida, Avery is co-principal investigator and founding member of the Open Science Grid (OSG). Avery talked about the history of OSG, some of the projects that leverage its resources, and OSG's relationship with TeraGrid.
Read More...
TeraGrid '09: Thriving in an Exponentially Changing World
Before he even took the podium, Ed Seidel was one of the buzz makers at the TeraGrid '09 conference. The day before his keynote, it was announced that he was stepping in as acting assistant director of the National Science Foundation's math and physical sciences directorate. For his talk at the conference, however, Seidel focused on the issues and efforts within his home at NSF, the Office of Cyberinfrastructure.
Read More...
Top Headlines
3D Seismic Data: Taking a Smarter Approach to Interpretation
Jul 09 | Engineer Live | The demand for computational tools to underpin the 3D seismic interpretation process has never been more apparent. Read more...
Engineering Unemployment Soared in 2Q to 8.6%
Jul 08 | EE Times | Unemployment for U.S. engineers has reached record levels, according to government figures. Read more...
Gartner Adjusts 2009 IT Spend Downward Again
Jul 08 | Network World | Global spending for 2009 projected to drop 6 percent, for a total of $3.2 trillion. Read more...
Concurrent and Parallel Are Not The Same
Jul 08 | Linux Magazine | Portability or efficiency? Neither is guaranteed when writing explicit parallel code. Read more...
800 TFLOP Real-Time Ray Tracing GPU Unveiled, Not for Gamers
Jul 07 | Ars Technica | Japanese company builds custom ASIC to accelerate real-time ray traced rendering for the auto industry. Read more...
Featured Whitepapers
Building High Performance Computing in a Green and Modular Solution Building Block
Apr 14 | | Many HPC IT departments are feeling the rising pressure to deliver more capacity computing and performance while trying to reduce the total cost of ownership. This white paper discusses how an environmentally-friendly and open-standards HPC building block based computing system using flexible interconnect options helps address capacity computing needs.
Multimedia
Webcast: Dell Expands HPC Access and Adoption with Intel Cluster Ready Program
Source: Addison Snell, GM/VP, Tabor Research; sponsored by Dell
Many organizations that could benefit from the use of HPC clusters find that it is complicated to get the systems up and running because of limited IT resources or the complexities of the clusters themselves. Learn how the Intel Cluster Ready program, for which Dell was an original partner, seeks to address this challenge for entry level and mid-range HPC users.
Video White Paper: Architecting a Better Network Storage Solution
BlueArc's Titan architecture represents an evolutionary step in file servers by creating a hardware-based file system that can scale bandwidth, IOPS, and overall data capacity well beyond conventional software-based devices. With its ability to virtualize a massive storage pool of up to four usable petabytes of tiered storage, Titan can scale with growing data requirements, offering a competitive advantage for businesses, researchers, or other enterprises seeking to better manage data growth while still ensuring optimal performance.
Webcast: HPC Development Solutions: Sun Studio & Sun HPC ClusterTools
Sun Studio Compilers and Tools and Sun HPC ClusterTools allow you to create high performance parallel applications for OpenSolaris, Solaris and Linux. Sun Studio Express 11/08 includes MPI performance analysis capabilities and full OpenMP 3.0 compiler support. Learn about all this and the latest in Sun HPC ClusterTools 8.1.
Newsletters
Stay informed! Subscribe to HPCwire email Newsletters.
HPC Job Bank
-
HPC Systems Administrator
McGill University -
High Performance Computing Data Center Manager
National Renewable Energy Laboratory -
High Performance Computing Systems Administrator
Idaho National Laboratory -
Solution Engineer- HPC
Dell Inc -
Parallel Programmer
Cardiff University -
Principal Software Research Engineer
Indiana University -
Post Doctoral Researcher - Exascale Stream Computing
IBM - Visit the HPCwire Job Bank
Featured Events
-
July 13-16, 2009
WORLDCOMP'09
Las Vegas , NV
USA
-
August 24-28, 2009
Data Mining: Levels I, II, & III
Denver , CO
USA