MASLab 2001

MASLab's first-ever contest was held in January 2001. Due to the experimental nature of the hardware, the contest, and really the whole idea of MASLab, registration was limited to three teams.

The hardware that was used was a staff-developed microprocessor board featuring a 30MHz Hitachi SH-2 RISC and an altera CPLD implementing most of the PWM and quad phase features. The SH-2 had A/Ds built in, but an external analog mux was included to increase flexibility. We called the board "Otto", a pun on "Autonomous" and the bus driver on The Simpsons.

Code was written in C, compiled with GCC, and downloaded to the robot via a serial cable. The board had 2MB of DRAM and 512KB of FLASH memory for the user's programs. The staff provided a lightweight multithreading runtime and a handful of other useful routines.

The contest was very simple: explore an unknown playing field gathering beacons, and bring those beacons back to the robot's starting position. The beacons, similar to those used in 2002, were active infrared emitters. Using a directional receiver, a bearing to the beacon could be determined. Even though it was MASLab's first year, the core elements of the class were established: a randomized playfield, and an extremely difficult problem.

A hilights video is available here.