DXb\1;GD7DIH
RUNAWAY
ROBOTS
Rovers at the first annual
SparkFun Autonomous Vehicle
Competition have minds
of their own.
BY MARK FRAUENFELDER
A
B
2 p.m., April 15, 2009, in an industrial parking lot outside Boulder, Colo.:
It’s not looking good for Team DIY Drones. Their entry, a self-guided airplane,
is now stuck in a tree 150 feet above the racecourse.
making last-minute adjustments on a menagerie
of wheeled, winged, and spherical vehicles. They’re
participants in SparkFun’s first Autonomous Vehicle
Competition, and they’ve traveled from as far as
Oklahoma and California to find out if their robot
can circumnavigate the parking lot around SparkFun’s headquarters in the shortest time.
It seems like a simple challenge — only four left
turns are required to complete the course — but
because the vehicles must navigate under their own
control, using onboard positioning technology and
collision avoidance (base stations are forbidden),
it’s a much harder task than one might think.
Team DIY Drones is brimming with confidence at
the prospect of winning. As the only entrants with
an airborne vehicle (a styrofoam, remote-control
model airplane outfitted with a guidance system
they designed called the ArduPilot), Anderson and
Muñoz have both speed and an obstacle-free path
Five minutes earlier, team member Jordi Muñoz,
an experienced remote control pilot, made an error
while preparing the drone for its third autonomous
run around the course, and it plowed into the
branches. The drone’s first and second runs had
been disqualified for clipping the corners of the
competition course. Now Muñoz and his fellow
team member, Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson,
are staring up at their drone like a pair of Charlie
Browns foiled by the kite-eating tree.
2: 10 p.m.: Someone from the crowd is shimmying up the tree to retrieve the drone, but a man who
looks like a drill sergeant stomps out of a nearby
building and shouts, “Get down from there! We don’t
have insurance for anyone to climb trees!”
Photography by John Maushammer (above left) and Mark Frauenfelder
Earlier that day, 9: 50 a.m.: Sixteen teams
are hunched over tables in SparkFun’s warehouse,
72 Make: Volume 19
