Automatic Snow Clearing Robot Contest

we're getting it we're getting we're getting it there she goes come on don't lose [Music] traction

yeah come on five four three two one [Music]

we're in st paul minnesota for the institute of navigation's autonomous snowplow contest it's a yearly competition that invites university and college engineering students to use their navigation and control

technologies to create robots with the sole purpose of clearing as much snow as possible from a designated area without any human intervention engineers kit out

their vehicles with radio beacons blazers optical and ultrasonic sensors so that the robots can autonomously navigate themselves with thousands of dollars in prize money at stake

plus a whole lot of bragging rights the robots and their makers get ready to plow growing up in michigan you know we i i woke up at five a.m excited about a snow day and then i'd go shovel the

driveway for an hour the idea is that this would completely replace someone having to do that and especially in bigger cities such as st paul where we are right now it could be very helpful to have these robots

working at night to clear all the snow that way when everyone's coming to work the next day there it could decrease the number of slips and falls from the ice that kind of thing our first team up is the university of

st thomas one of our hometown teams [Applause] [Music] we're using a laser rangefinder uh technology called lidar that can map your uh an unknown

environment and sort of learn what your driveway looks like to can now navigate that space to apply your driveway [Music] this is our robot auto xl the things that we need to do to have a really good

run is really stay on track with our localization and our path planning to make sure that we uh we plow the exact path that we want and move the most amount of snow out of

the way there's a huge deduction for hitting obstacles so we have to miss our obstacles if you want to get into first place this little guy right up here

it's a ultra wide band beacon it uses a radio frequency to communicate with other beacons that we place around the field that gives you the distance between this and all the other beacons and from that

you can back out the robot's location so we have to detect a stop sign during our competition run we have two webcams here and they're just looking for red octagons and they stop whenever they see that

the technology that we're developing here can be used for autonomous cars same basic concept it's really easy for us as humans to look around and figure out where we are

in relation to everything around us but your computer just has no concept of where it is so you have to use all these sensors together um to make that to make that determination

and i think we're done all right done [Music] if we had an award for most coordinated plow

and headwear looks wendigo would win the wendigo plow is four-wheel drive this is all optical we put up some posts with some large reflectors we're shooting a blue beam of

light at it we're hoping to be able to catch that blob of blue reflected back at us [Music] so snow devils takes kind of a simple

approach to autonomous navigation we actually use magnetic sensors and a magnetic strip so the idea would be that you could embed this strip into a sidewalk or bury it along the edges of your driveway

and be able to pick up that strip and autonomously clear a snow field from either your driveway or sidewalk hear that [Music] our motors are failing all right kill it

kill it we're done feeling good but i just wish it would have done more but we always got next year the first place for this year after a

long weekend of competition and lots of challenges team auto xl university congratulations just seeing

how much progress that the guitar's car for example is coming out i'm very excited about the future for autonomy and for artificial intelligence i think it i think it can just do so much good it can say it can literally save so many

lives so that's what really motivates me is that uh you know i i

what i'm good at is learning things so i

want to be able to learn things you