The University of Wisconsin-Madison IEEE Robotics Team is a student run organization which competes in the annual Intelligent Ground Vehicle competition (IGVC) in Michigan and participates in outreach events with industry, hobbyists, and younger students. We are a multi-disciplined group of primarily mechanical engineers, electrical and computer engineers, and computer scientists. All of the robots used by the team are designed and constructed entirely by students on the team, including the software and embedded systems.

Our mission is to give students hands-on experience working as a team to produce an autonomous robot from conception to production. Our members, all undergraduates, are passionate about their work and dedicate large amounts of their free time on a weekly basis to the team. We are friends, classmates, and colleagues.

IGVC

The main goal motivating the IEEE Robotics team is the Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition (IGVC) each June in Rochester, Michigan. Continuously increasing in difficulty, the challenge demands that students continue to improve on previous member's experience and continue to develop new technologies and components. This competition has real-world constraints such as funding and fixed deadlines, is outcome assessed, and provides an opportunity to excel at a very difficult task.

IGVC consists of four main challenges:

• The Autonomous challenge requires that our robot navigate through an obstacle course without human intervention. The robot must stay within two white lines painted on grass, and avoid obstacles such as barrels, cones, ramps, potholes, and sand pits. As the robot progresses through the course, navigation becomes more difficult, and hitting an obstacle or driving over the painted line boundaries ends the run. Scoring is based on the total distance traveled and the time taken to travel that distance.
• The Navigation challenge requires navigate to a predetermined list of GPS waypoints in the shortest time possible. This task is complicated by the fences, barrels, and other random obstacles that obstruct the most efficient path. The robot must be able to adapt to changes in its environment that prevent it from reaching its goal. Success in this challenge is based on the number of waypoints reached and the fastest time.
• The JAUS Challenge is based on meeting several increasingly difficult levels of compliance with the JAUS protocol. JAUS, or the Joint Architecture for Unmanned Systems, is a component based, message-passing architecture that specifies data formats and methods of communication among computing nodes. The idea behind JAUS is to create a platform independent robotics interface that allows any system that implements the JAUS protocol to interact with and control virtually any JAUS robot.
• The design competition is an evaluation of each team's conceptual design for their robot based on a written report and oral presentation with demonstration. Robots are evaluated based on their design strategy and process, innovations, and overall implementation quality.

Engineering Expo:

The team also competes in the UW-Madison Engineering Expo, a biannual event hosted by the College of Engineering. It is one of the largest events on campus. Part of this event is a robotics competition in which anyone in the community can compete. In previous years, this robotics competition involved collecting and sorting different colored tennis balls and scoring them in raised goals.

Outreach

The IEEE Robotics team is involved in getting K-12 students interested in robotics and engineering. We have put on demonstrations of our robot and talks for various groups, including the PEOPLE program and a local Lego League team. The IEEE robot team is currently mentoring the Science Olympiad team at Lodi High School. We provide our engineering expertise to help them be successful in the upcoming competition. Additionally, we set up a booth at the UW-Madison Engineering Expo biannually to share our project with the Madison public, and we have presented at Milwaukee community events and Madison Area SolidWorks Users Group meetings as well. We hope to in the future start up a program in conjunction with the Engineering Expo helping out local high school robotic teams.

History

The team began in 2002 as a group of electrical and computer engineers within the UW-Madison student chapter of IEEE. These students worked on robotics projects and participated in various competitions including the Jerry Sanders Design Competition and Engineering Expo. After the team began competing in the Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition in 2004, the team split from the larger IEEE organization and became the IEEE Robot Team. See the projects page for a history of robots entered in various competitions.