EE Seniors' SwarmBot Project Chosen as Cornell Cup Finalists

November 16, 2011

Seniors Adam Iseman, Ben Evans, Warren Cheng, and Alex Tsado will compete in the 2012 Intel Cornell Cup embedded design competition, with the final presentations to be held next May in Walt Disney World. The team will have the opportunity to win up to $10,000.

Their project, which will now receive $2,500 in support plus hardware, is the SwarmBot: a fleet of low-cost autonomous robots that could be used in environments inaccessible or hazardous for humans - for instance, to rapidly explore a disaster zone by carrying sensors throughout the area.

Their project will incorporate sensor processing, wireless communications, probabilistic mapping, and autonomous control. The swarm will distribute tasks and processing according to the heterogeneous capabilities of the member robots, while remaining robust to problems or failures that may befall any individual robot.