This is the 3rd year of the UCI Rescue Robotics Competition. It is organized by Professors McCarthy (MAE), Harris (CS), and Krichmar (CS/CogSci). For our Ground Team, we are working with Professors McCarthy and Krichmar. The competition is held annually during May in Aldrich Park, and pits different high school robotics teams against each other, with the goal being to expose high school students to STEM via robotics. This project has real world relevance, as using swarms of robots can decrease the time searching for survivors after a disaster and increase the chances of survival in the thousands of search and rescue operations performed worldwide each year. Our role is to design and adjudicate the competition and develop the base robotics platforms on which the students base and adapt their designs (more or less a role model).

The overall goal of the project is to garner further exposure to STEM programs in high schools across Orange County. This year, our goal as a Senior Design Team is to design, upgrade and refine the robots from the previous years to incorporate a swarming algorithm. This will hopefully increase efficiency of the search, and increase the possibility of disaster victim survival in real world scenarios.

This year, we are developing a new chassis platform (Rover 5) to further lower the cost of entry for the high school teams who don’t have a large budget (~$1000) to spare. We also plan to use the Rover 5 robots together with the existing six-wheeled design to develop and incorporate a heterogeneous swarm of robots that can communicate and work together to locate the victims.

This program exposes high school students across Orange County to STEM via robotics, with a real world application in that the robots that both our team and the high school teams develop are a step forward towards fully autonomous search and rescue teams.