MASLab 2002

MASLab 2002 had drastically more teams than previous years and brand new hardware as well. Students were given more sophisticated hardware to allow them to program more advanced control algorithms, and the result was impressive. Students managed to work around some bugs in the new hardware to produce robots which could autonomously navigate an unknown course and locate target beacons resulting in a fun contest for all.

The Contest

The contest was an overwhelming success in spite of the fact that only a few robots scored points. Spectors witnessed first hand the student's ingenuity as robots triangulated target locations and used odemetry to find their way home.

The Teams

Fourteen teams competed in MASLab 2002 and each team produced a unique robot: from counterbalanced forklift robots to carefully calibrated gripper robots each team attacked the problem in a different way.

The Kit

The MASLab staff developed a completely new ORC robotics controller and provided students with iPAQ handheld computers as the compute engine. Students used infrared detectors to locate the infrared beacons distributed throughout the course.

Wiki Forums

The Wiki is an interactive web forum which contains team journals, lecture notes, and day-to-day communication between students and staff.

Photographs

We have a wide variety of photographs including candid shots from lab, robots portraits, and contest day photos.

Sponsors

We would like to thank all of the 2002 sponsors who made this contest possible including Advanced Circuits, Microsoft, MIT EECS, Accurite, Allegro, Acroname, Altera, Innoveda, Microchip, Molex, PCMCIA, and Surplus Center.