The competition, organized by the Indian Institute of Technology,
Bombay, saw 15 teams from four different countries (Australia, India,
Sri Lanka and Thailand) participating. Six teams from Thailand earned
passage in the final round, including the top three teams from the
iNexus Thailand Robot Competition organized by the Asian Institute of
Technology (AIT) in December 2009.
The A.N.T.Z. competition was a demonstration of Swarm Robotics, a new
approach to the coordination of fully autonomous multirobot systems.
A.N.T.Z. introduces students to the highly exciting field which
originated from the colony behaviour of ants. A.N.T.Z. challenges
students to design "ants" which will search for sugar cubes and store
them safely at their own little shelters. The sugar cubes were modelled
as blocks of fixed, given dimensions, and the job of modelling the ants
was left at the students’ disposal.
The competition with two categories--Type A Category (6x6 search area)
and Type B category ( 4 x 4 search area) had two robots searching for
the objects which are randomly placed in the search area and needed to
bring the objects to the assigned locations. The first prize winner is
the team which completed the assignment with the highest score. The
IRAP team finished the assignment with the score of 479 out of 500
within 21 seconds, faster than the second prize winner from Australia
by more than one minute with the score below 400.
The Australian team won the second place in the Type A category. The
team from India won the first prize of Type B category.
Highlights of the type A category competition can be found on YouTube
at this
link:
The successful teams from Thailand were aided with a travel
sponsorship following their victory at the iNexus Thailand Robot
Competition held last year. KMUTNB won the best design prize, while the
Singburi Technical College won the second prize at the competition. The
event was organized and sponsored by the Asian Institute of Technology
(AIT), in close collaboration with the Thai Robotics Society.
Dr. Nitin Afzulpurkar, Dean, School of Engineering and Technology at
AIT, said AIT was proud of its intense involvement in technological
advancement. “Sponsorship the competition and awarding cash prizes to
the winners is a reflection of AIT’s continuing long-term objective of
being a very forefront of international engineering excellence,” he
said. AIT, founded in 1959, is one of the premier engineering
educational institutes in Asia. It remains committed to fostering
talents of Asian students and continues to offer a wide range of
undergraduate and post-graduate opportunities for study.
