Robot Football At Notre Dame
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Monday, 12 of April , 2010 at 3:31 am
We got a tweet from @NDRobots letting us know about an annual robot football competition at Notre Dame. As the final project of their senior year, 60-70 engineering undergrads are split into teams to design and build the robots, which play a remarkably realistic game of 8v8 football. The field is 94 feet long and 50 feet wide, and the rules are basically the same as standard American football: you get kick-offs, first downs, punts, and field goals. The scoring is slightly different (rewarding successful robot to robot passing), but even tackling is implemented:
Tackling: Each player has a tackle sensor (like an air bag sensor in a car) that shuts off power to the robot for 2 seconds when it is hit hard enough to register a tackle. A green running light indicates an operational player, a blue light indicates a tackled player, and a throbbing red light indicates pain due to repeated or serious impacts.
The bots are primarily remote controlled, but the students are working on some autonomous behaviors, such as a single button push for a three robot snap-receive-handoff combo.
Video interview on the competition, after the jump.
[ Notre Dame Robotics Football ]
Comments (2)
Category: Competitive
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Comment by Jackie
Made Monday, 12 of April , 2010 at 7:12 am
Hey guys, thanks for highlighting our event! We’re pretty excited to get the 2nd year’s event under way this week with the Combine. If anyone’s interested in watching the game live, we’ll have a live stream of it on April 23 at 7:00pm (and some video highlights from the game the next week hopefully).
We should have the link to the stream on our website over at http://ndrobots.com on the day of the event.
Take care guys!
Jackie
Comment by Bill
Made Tuesday, 20 of April , 2010 at 10:24 am
Notre Dame’s goal here is to introduce a new intercollegiate competition that will be fun for all spectatotrs and demonstrate the challenges and excitement of engineering. Sponsors include Motorola and the American Society for Engineering Education. The kicking units will be the big scoring wild card this year.
