[2006] RoboCup Rescue Robot League - CASTER Scorpion and Redback!

Gee I'm getting behind in my updates!

Well we were at RoboCup again in 2006, fielding a team of robots including our updated robot, CASTER Scorpion, and a couple of Redback robots!

A particular feature of our new look CASTER robot was the big sensor arm on the back of the robot, which allows it to direct perception and look into holes, over boxes and the like. The sensorhead itself contains a variety of cutting edge sensors including a SwissRanger SR-2B range imager, FLIR ThermoVision A10 thermal camera and an Allied Vision Technologies high resolution camera. All up, we can produce 3D maps, detect victims via bodyheat and look at objects with better than 20/20 vision! Other sensors on the robot included two Hokuyo scanline laser rangefinders for 2D mapping and an omnidirectional camera for driving. A JVC InterLink notebook computer provided onboard computation and communications.

Our Redback robots were also highly capable and carried two cameras and a laser rangefinder capable of building 3D maps. Each also carried an OQO 01+ PC for communication and computation.

Our software was also further developed with a new, more complete user interface that combined mapping and driving tasks and allowed for the control of multiple robots. We published a paper at Systems, Man and Cybernetics 2006 on this interface. Our communications infrastructure also advanced with a combination of Player and ICE middlewares providing for realtime control as well as on-demand complex datatypes like merged high resolution images with depth maps.

With so much new stuff we were hoping for a good turnout - we were able to easily make the semi-finals but much to our disappointment, we suffered wire fatigue in an RS-232 line at the back of the arm which disabled CASTER Scorpion - right where it was in the way of our Redback robots! We managed to get to a victim with a Redback but unfortunately weren't able to get a close enough look to score points ... ah well ... always next time! :-)