The end of the 2009 academic year meant different things for different students: for Curtin’s Block Pirates it meant more time to teach robots to cooperate.<\/p>\n
Block Pirates is one of several teams working to ensure their robots will be competitive in the iNexus Robotics Competition to be held at Curtin on 5 December 2009.<\/p>\n
Hosted jointly by Curtin Business School, Curtin’s Faculty of Science and Engineering and ITT Bombay, the competition is the Australian qualifying round for the Techfest 2010 ANTZ Challenge in Mumbai.<\/p>\n
[youtube]http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=aVo-rFnuLak[\/youtube]<\/p>\n
Footage of one of the Curtin Block Pirates robots in action.<\/strong><\/p>\n Block Pirates’ Yusuf Syaid said the team’s two robots were nearly complete and the challenge now was teaching them to communicate and cooperate effectively.<\/p>\n Based on the emerging field of swarm robotics, the ANTZ Challenge requires teams to build two autonomous robot ‘ants’ which must work together to locate, collect and store ‘sugar cubes.’<\/p>\n Once placed on the competition grid, robots must locate the ‘sugar cube’ blocks, formulate a plan for the division of labour and then set about the task of collection and storage.<\/p>\n The robots must do all this without input from their creators and while avoiding the stiff penalties incurred for any breach of the rules – including collisions.<\/p>\n ‘Just doing the whole thing quickly is the main challenge,’ said Block Pirates’ Mike Hamer.’<\/p>\n Block Pirates are one of two Curtin teams competing against teams representing universities from across the country.<\/p>\n Mr Syaid, – Block Pirates’ hardware specialist – said he was very much looking forward to seeing how the different teams had approached the challenges involved in the project.<\/p>\n ‘How physically they’ve made them\u00a0 – whether they’ve made them square, or rectangular or circular; what kind of block-acquisition tools they have,’ Mr Syaid said.<\/p>\n Mr Syaid said that the upcoming event held at SciTech, the night before the competition, would be the first opportunity the teams will have to get together.<\/p>\n ‘There’ll be a little display \u2013 all the teams will be there with their robots so we can see what we’ve made and compare notes,’ Mr Syaid said.<\/p>\n ‘There’s also an after-party planned just for the ‘bot teams to get together and to wind down.’<\/p>\n One member from each of the three top teams will travel to Mumbai to compete in the finals to held in January 2010.<\/p>\n But win or lose, Mr Syaid said participating in the competition as a team had been a great experience.<\/p>\n ‘We’re pretty pleased with how it’s all gone so far, but in the end we all just want to have fun too,’ Mr Syaid said.<\/p>\n The iNexus competition will be held on 5 December 2009 in Curtin’s Elizabeth Jolley Theatre as part of an Engineering Expo featuring displays and workshops.<\/p>\n [imagebrowser id=12]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" With less than a week to go, Curtin’s Block Pirates are fine-tuning their robots for the challenge on the 5 December 2009.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_oasis_is_in_workflow":0,"_oasis_original":0,"_oasis_task_priority":"","_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_research-areas":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"research-areas":[],"class_list":["post-4652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campus-and-global-community"],"acf":{"post_options":{"":null,"additional_content":{"title":"","content":"","image":false},"related_courses":false,"credits":{"author":"","photographer":"","media":false},"display_author":true,"banner":{"image":false}}},"featured_image":false,"author_meta":{"first_name":"Jarrad","last_name":"Long","display_name":"Jarrad Long"},"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-21 00:13:03","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4652"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4652\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4652"},{"taxonomy":"research-areas","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/research-areas?post=4652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}