Robotic Showdown Highlights Innovative CS Class
Left to Right: Scott Myers, Matt Edwards, Krida Karnchanachari, and Phuoc "Trong" Chu

About 75 people gathered at 4pm on December 13th in Lederle room A307 to witness 5 robots navigate a maze while collecting “ancient Incan treasure”. The treasure was in actuality golden bows positioned within specific locations throughout the maze, but the excitement was high nonetheless.

Oliver Brock, assistant professor of computer science, led five teams to this day through his course CS403, Introduction to Robotics. The course took the students and their AmigoBots through a series of five labs. Lab one consisted of having the AmigoBots hit into walls. In lab two the students learned how to center the AmigoBots through C++ computer language. For lab 3 they programmed the AmigoBots to gage the shortest distance from one point to another. In lab 4 AmigoBot was able to recognize its location within the maze. By lab 5 the students took everything they learned and basically rewrote all of their earlier code to correct for previous errors.

Their training paid off. For the actual competition the AmigoBots, “Lesco”,  “Midnight Oil”, “Red Dwarf”, “Scorpions”, and “Hawks” were placed randomly within the maze. Each team had to rely on the quality of the code they had written and an electronic map of the maze in order to win.  Whenever an AmigoBot encountered a treasure, it had to ask for it. The robots were programmed to verbally ask for the treasure using sounds/expressions that students downloaded into the AmigoBot.

The Scorpions team took first place for collecting the most treasure.  The Scorpions were: Scott Myers, Matt Edwards, Krida Karnchanachari, and Phuoc “Trong” Chu, all seniors who plan to graduate this spring.  They wrote 6,300 lines of code (including comments) in order to get their AmigoBot through the maze while collecting the most “Incan treasure”. 

Scott Myers found CS403 to be “…much different than most other computer science classes. It deals with new concepts and new ideas, and was a lot of fun.” The course incorporates kinematics, computational geometry, linear algebra, trigonometry, engineering, probability theory, and a bit of sociology. But most importantly, according to Professor Brock, the course required teamwork and gave the students a chance to take what they learned and actually apply it. Too often students are presented with theories that they perceive to be taught only because they are required and not really applicable to the real world. CS403 teaches students how to apply these theories in real world problem-solving.

During the previous year’s course Brock could not offer AmigoBots. Instead he had small, simple robots that were guided by palm pilots. For this year’s course he approached department head Bruce Croft and asked for $10,000 in funding to buy five AmigoBots. Fortunately Croft gave him the funding and Brock was able to provide sophisticated robots that taught his 19 students the importance of applied theory, teamwork, tenacity, and good code.