Category: Press Release

The robot with SECOnITX-ION  was on Estonia's national television (link to video: http://etv.err.ee/index.php?05629907&video=2046 Find the robot with SECO technology at 2.05”).
At the moment the robot is also working autonomously and is able to score goals.

 

The robot has been built for the next Estonia’s biggest robotics competition, Robotex 2011. For a third year in a row, the competitors have had to build autonomous mobile robots that play a football-like game, where two robots have to find golf balls and kick them at the goal.

In longer perspective the aim of the competition is to advance the knowledge of the competitors to such extent, that it would be possible to compete in RoboCup.

Tarmo Prillop, building team member declares the choice of SECO SBC especially for two reasons:

• Smaller size 

• NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics processor

“SECOnITX-ION with its nanoITX form-factor it is a lot smaller than the platform which we used last year. Smaller size means that we have more room for our custom electronics and mechatronic solutions. Also we able to make our robot much more compact.

Graphics processors are very efficient and fast in processing high amounts of data, which is needed for image processing. With the help of parallel computing architecture CUDA we are able to process images coming from the camera much quicker than before, increasing our robots competitiveness”.

Robotex is the biggest robotics competition of Estonia and it is coordinated by Tallinn University of Technology in cooperation with the University of Tartu and the Estonian Information Technology College. The event takes place for the eleventh time. The first competition was held in the assembly hall of TUT in 2001. Throughout the years, contestants have had different tasks: line following, passing through a maze, volleyball, rope climbing, cleaning up a room and football, just to name a few. There have been participants from many schools, universities, companies and also from abroad. Since 2008 the event has been taken place in TUT Sports Hall where there are better conditions and more space for it. That has made it possible to organize workshops, exhibitions and displays. From 2010 Robotex is a two-day event. The first day is aimed to guarantee the continuity of engineers in the robotics field and so competitions on easier tasks take place. The second day, on the other hand, focuses on experienced robot builders and requires, therefore, a higher technical level and more knowledge. On two occasions also a technical trade fair has taken place during Robotex.