A U T O M A T I O N Rise of the ai NZ Engineering News’ Ricky Harris eyes autonomous robots as they compete for glory When I hear the acronym AI, I can’t help but envisage ‘Arnie’ emerging from the flames as the muscled-up terminator. But for students competing at the 2017 National Instruments Autonomous Robotics Competition (NIARC) in Sydney last month, AI was the fundamental component for developing an autonomous robot to compete in the live finals. It’s also very much going to play a big part of our future. This year some 24 teams from Australia, New Zealand and Singapore battled for bragging rights with RMIT University breaking through in a sudden-death knockout - terminating the hopes of many hard working teams. But unlike Skynet, with an objective to eradicate humankind, the students’ mission and competition theme ‘Transportation Innovation’ meant their robots had to navigate a city of obstacles and changing road 40 October 2017 rules while safely picking up passengers and returning home with speed and efficiency. “It was a challenging course and our robot certainly wasn’t the fastest in the competition but it turns out, slow and steady really does win the race,” says Genevieve Houghton of the winning RMIT team. “This was the first time many of us have competed in NIARC so to come away with the win was a very pleasant surprise. We enjoyed seeing all of the designs from the other teams and it has definitely been a great learning experience for us.” RMIT’s first place earned them a trip to Austin, Texas where they’ll attend NIWeek, a leading engineering conference attended by thousands of professional engineers and scientists from more than 60 countries. But it wasn’t all about winning. Students relished the opportunity to meet and learn off other teams. “The competition itself is awesome, we got to meet
ENoct17-eMag-2
To see the actual publication please follow the link above