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Team wins second place at third-annual NASA Swarmathon
May 21, 2018 | Jim Townsend
University of Houston-Clear Lake computer engineering students, in partnership with peers from San Jacinto College, took second place honors in NASA’s 2018 Swarmathon “Mission to Mars,” a competition to program robot rovers to simulate tasks they would encounter on the red planet’s rocky surface. The team moved up from its fourth-place finish in 2017 and its sixth-place finish in 2016. Twenty-eight institutions participated in this year’s competition. NASA’s Minority University Research Program funds the events, which are organized by the University of New Mexico’s Moses Biological Computation Lab and held at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. Pictured (front l-r) are Sharmin Rahman of Houston, UHCL Assistant Professor of Computer Engineering Luong Nguyen and Zulma Vacatoledo of Friendswood; (back l-r) Wilber Barquero of Pearland, Hal Twitty of Pasadena and Arnoldo Chapa of Pasadena. Not shown is team member Jose Plaza of Rosharon.
The three-year competition featured autonomous programming tasks of increasing complexity. Teams compete in virtual and physical events, writing code to instruct NASA-provided rovers, called “Swarmies.” In 2016, robots were programmed to run a course and return to where they started. In 2017, object search and retrieval were added to the tasks. This year, the rovers also had to navigate around random obstacles. Physical teams uploaded their code to the rovers. Virtual teams developed distributed search and communication algorithms for Swarmies running in a simulation. Physical and virtual teams competed for cash prizes.
The purpose of the competition is to push the development of robotic swarm technology. Ideally, each robot needs to be “aware” of where it is, what it is doing and communicate that information to other robots so that they can cooperate in the task.
Find out more about educational opportunities in computer engineering and robotics by visiting www.uhcl.edu/science-engineering or calling 281-283-3700.