Many competitors met their match/end on the Discombobulator, Sparkfun’s incredibly dangerous new obstacle course addition. Source: Sparkfun

It wouldn’t be June in Colorado without the Sparkfun Autonomous Vehicle Competition. Started back in 2009, the annual event is held at their global headquarters near Boulder, CO. 

It was the first event at their new location and sadly, due to their proximity to a major road, the aerial portion of the competition was not to be had this year.

If you haven’t been an AVC before, the concept is similar to the original DARPA Grand Challenge, but on a much smaller scale: specifically, the size of the parking lot at Sparkfun. Ground vehicles (of various mobility) costing only a few hundred dollars are hacked together to compete in heats with about five other robots, though some don’t always make it to the line. The course consists of four right hand turns, barrel obstacles, and other competitors, who may not be as responsible or friendly as Google vs Delphi.

There are time bonuses for navigating through hoops and jumping ramps. New this year was shortcut option with an obstacle called the Discombobulator. A spinning platform, aimed at completely disoriented any robot that dared to cross it. The robots take on all sorts of different designs from the traditionally converted RC car, to a modified FIRST robot. I was highly impressed by a hexapod entry in the non-traditional class.

Firey destruction in Sparkfun’s Combat Bot arena. Source: Sparkfun

This is a highly spirited event with a newly added micro robot combat in lieu of the aerial competition and all sorts of workshops throughout the day. Even if you weren’t able to attend there were a few options allowing you to get involved. There was the live web feed and then there was Twitch. Using an EdiBot frame, Twitch was a crowdsource controlled bot, that anyone was able to command taking the inputs as they were received, allowing multiple people to control it at once. What could possibly go wrong? While he was scheduled to run on a few heats, Twitch barely made it off the line to the first right turn.

Check out the Sparkfun video recap below:

University of Sheffield (UK) AI and Robotics Professor Noel Sharkey (red tie) leading a group to protest killer robots.

Drones aren’t the only killer robots being discussed. There are also armed border robots in Israel and Korea, automatic missile defense systems on land and ships in many countries, and police surveillance drones. Except in the case of incoming missile defense, we don’t presently have the artificial intelligence capabilities to autonomously pick targets and implement armed attacks. In fact, we are many years away from that reality. Yet the headlines are written as if it is already happening.

Armed with Hellfire missiles, General Atomics Predator drone prepares for take-off.

“Killer robots” is a “sell-papers” type of issue. It uses enflamed rhetoric because of America’s prolonged and very public use of armed drones to kill terrorists (albeit with a committee of human pilots and operators that actually pull the trigger even though they are thousands of miles away from the action) and the anger and moral, ethical and legal backlash to that.

Nevertheless, these scary headlines, which call for banning drones of all types, are obscuring the worth of forthcoming commercial applications for unmanned and autonomous flying robots. Unmanned aerial vehicles and systems (UAV and UAS) in agriculture, for mapping and surveying, for search and rescue, disaster relief, science, border patrol and a myriad other applications will begin to appear in America in 2016 (earlier in the EU and Australia where they aren’t as limited by the FAA as are the Americans).

There is no denying the commercial value of these new UASs. One story involving drones occurred recently in Haiti — it has all the elements of smart business, enterprising activists, the fun of flying, and the pleasure of helping. But this story didn’t receive any headlines.

Adam Klaptocz is an engineer and project manager with senseFly, a Swiss spin-off from the EPFL (and recently acquired by the Parrot Group). senseFly makes drones for mapping. Their eBee drone can take pictures down to 2″ precision. Adam and another senseFly employee, Emanuele Lubrano, independently founded a non-profit organization, Drone Adventures, to focus on humanitarian, conservation and cultural uses of drones beyond just mapping. Their first project – funded entirely by donations and grants from the IOM – was a two-week trip to Haiti. You can read about their adventure in a recent Robohub article.

Haiti has endured several recent natural disasters including a terrible earthquake at the beginning of 2010, a violent cholera epidemic at the end of 2010 and Hurricane Sandy at the end of 2012. Disasters not only result in casualties but they also change the landscape of the country; buildings and roads are destroyed and refugees create ever-moving encampments. There is a continuous need for up-to-date imagery for aid distribution, reconstruction and disaster relief.

The Drone Adventures video below shows the fun, the involvement, the flexibility and the need. Bravo to these two adventurers and their new organization.

Although Parrot and senseFly didn’t fund Drone Adventures, they think the project is creative and might want to take part in future missions.

I’m worried that all the negative headlines – and fear reactions to those headlines – may lead to legislation which could hamper the natural emergence of this new and very capable technology. Hence the headline of this article: Don’t throw out the baby with the bath water.

Most robotics hobbyists will be familiar with the name SparkFun, associating it with an electronics and robotics parts and kits supply house, located in Boulder, Colorado, and perhaps also with the instructional videos they publish on their YouTube channel.

The SparkFun Autonomous Vehicle Competition (AVC) for 2013 took place Saturday, June 8th, on a strip of land separating Boulder Reservoir from a private lake to the south. The event site was fenced in, encompassing what I’d guess to be about ten acres, with an adjacent area of water of similar dimensions marked off by buoys for the aerial course. There was also a fence around the ground course, to separate the vehicles from the crowd.

Held annually since 2009, this is the first time that AVC has not been held on SparkFun’s home turf, located just across CO 119 from the reservoir. The weather for AVC 2013 was nearly ideal, and very comfortable, with only a light breeze, moderate temperature, about 50% cloud cover, but only the occasional drop of rain, and dewpoint about 40°F lower than the temperature. Barometric pressure was on the low side (29.98 in. Hg or lower, corrected to sea level), which may help account for some of the troubles in the aerial competition.

The ambiance was reminiscent of a country fair, with three food trucks on site, a sideshow or two, and raffle drawings based on a variety of parameters (instances of vehicles running into a barrel, number of vehicular collisions, etc.) during particular runs in the ground competition. There was music, intermittent sunshine on fresh green grass, a sandy beach and water that looked swimmable. And not least, the announcers for both ground and aerial competitions had comfortable control of their respective sound-spaces, keeping running commentaries going without resorting to elongated vowels or repetition.

As explained by Robert Cowan in an introductory video published two months prior to the event, featured on the 2013 event website, the move to the reservoir is not the only change from previous years. Instead of the fastest time determining the winner, a point system incorporating bonus points for accomplishment of specific tasks while negotiating the course was used.

On the ground, contestants started out with 300 points, from which one point was deducted for each second required to complete the course. Bonus points were awarded for each corner passed, for going through a hoop, and for jumping a ramp. In the air, contestants started out with 600 points, again with one point deducted for each second used. Aerial bonus points were awarded for crossing over the tip of a peninsula, for dropping a tennis ball onto that peninsula, for passing under a twenty-foot high ‘wicket’, for an autonomous landing, and for an autonomous landing within a restricted area. Most of the aerial course was over water.

In the aerial competition, they could have added a bonus for becoming airborne and establishing stable autonomous control, as failing to accomplish one or the other was a frequent occurrence. Perhaps teams from lower elevations underestimated how much difference a few thousand feet can make.

For the ground competition, vehicles were divided into one of four categories: Micro/PBR (less than $350 total spent, or small enough to fit into box that’s 10″x6″x4″), Doping ($1k+ or 25lbs+), Non-traditional locomotion (walker, pogostick, Segway-like balancing, motorized hamster ball, etc.) and Peloton (anything that didn’t fit in one of the other classes). There was also a student class (any robot that is 80% designed and built by high school or younger students), for which any student-built robot qualified, regardless of category. For the aerial competition there was no division into categories.

Autonomous operation is the key ingredient of this event, and overall I was very impressed with the results. For ground vehicles, the only human intervention allowed was at the starting line, to set the vehicle in motion. For aerial vehicles there was a similar requirement, except that manual landing was allowed, with autonomous landing constituting a bonus. While not altogether unique, this combination of autonomous operation and an open-air setting is rare, and precautions were in evidence everywhere, beginning with the waiver to be signed as a condition of entry at the ticket booth.

This sign was no idle warning. By the middle of the day, I’d seen one aerial vehicle rescued from diving into the crowd by a quick thinking operator who took over manual control just in time, another, which failed to get off the ground, taxiing directly toward a young spectator, and prevented from running right into him only because it was precisely centered between two of the posts ringing the parking lot (being used as a start line and landing strip) and its wings were too wide to fit between them. I’d also seen one over-eager ground vehicle go into the infield and do its best to climb a vertical object of some sort, and another, built from a full-sized go-cart, and therefore heavy enough to be dangerous, pin itself against the fence. There was a medical tent, staffed by paramedics, and an ambulance on standby, just in case.

While such risks go with the state of the art of autonomous robotics, the precautions proved adequate, and SparkFun is to be congratulated for a very professionally produced event.

Lest I leave you with the impression that the courses and bonus challenges were too much for the poor robots, I should add that several of the aerial contestants not only completed the course but racked up all of the bonus points. In the ground vehicle competition, more than a few entrants also finished the course, although I don’t know whether any of them also got all of the bonus points. For detailed results of the competitions, keep an eye on the event website, and on SparkFun’s YouTube channel.

The attached video, posted by Make Magazine, addresses what was apparently a subject of much discussion at the 2012 Open Hardware Summit, this past Thursday, which is MakerBot’s decision not to share the design files for its Replicator(TM)2 3D printer. What follows is the description that accompanies the video, with links inserted…

At this year’s Open Hardware Summit (9/27) in NYC, the MAKE video team asked some key participants (from MakerBot, SparkFun, Evil Mad Scienrist, OpenROV and others) what they thought about MakerBot closing off some of its source files. Here’s some of what they had to say.

While not strictly about robotics, there is a high degree of overlap between the open source hardware movement and hobbyist robotics. In particular, 3D printers are frequently employed to fabricate parts for robots.