Robotic Sentries to Descend on British Town In Contest
by Tim Stevens, posted May 1st 2008 at 11:13AM
In the U.S. we have DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which hosts regular challenges for things like cars that can race around cities sans drivers. The closest U.K. equivalent is the Ministry of Defense Grand Challenge, which tasks teams of engineers to come up with solutions to provide enhanced intelligence to troops on the ground. Competitors for that challenge are set to invade a sleepy British village next month with autonomous flying robots and other cool bits of tech.
Competitors will be tasked with having their automated sentries automatically survey the terrain to "detect, identify, monitor and report the position of a wide range of threats" according to the challenge Web site. Teams will be scored based on the number of threats identified, but will have points detracted if they need to resort to manual control of their devices. Six teams have signed up to compete. Some teams are relying exclusively on aerial bots, while others will use a combination of ground-based rovers and flying sentries to find threats. It sounds like it should be a fun show, and we can't wait for the consumer toy versions to be released. [Source: News.com]
