"Describes a variety of robot competitions held in the United States and around the world"--

Robot competitions are a fun way for people who build robots to test their designs. Roboticists face off in exciting challenges and contests to determine whose robot is the smartest, the fastest, or the strongest. From playing soccer to moving through mazes to completing search-and-rescue missions, these robots are designed to do amazing things. Find out more about fascinating robot competitions all around the world and how they're challenging people to build robots that are even more incredible!

"Describes a variety of robot competitions held in the United States and around the world"--

Each year thousands of students of all ages enter robot competitions through their schools or other organizations. They can compete alone or as part of a team in competitions like Lunabotics Junior and the RoboCupJunior soccer games. Learn about the history of robot competitions, how students can get creative with their robots, and more.

Personal robots are about as advanced today as personal computers were on the eve of the first IBM PC in the early 1980s. They are still the domain of hobbyists who cobble them together from scratch or from kits, join local clubs to swap code and stage contests, and whose labor of love is setting the stage for a technological revolution. This book will deconstruct the 30 regional winning robot designs from the FIRST Robotics Competition in 2006. The FIRST Robotics Competition (held annually and co-founded by Dean Kamen and Woodie Flowers) is a multinational competition that teams professionals and young people to solve an engineering design problem in an intense and competitive way. In 2005 the competition reached close to 25,000 people on close to 1,000 teams in 30 competitions. Teams came from Brazil, Canada, Ecuador, Israel, Mexico, the U.K., and almost every U.S. state. The competitions are high-tech spectator sporting events that have gained a loyal following because of the high caliber work featured. Each team is paired with a mentor from such companies as Apple, Motorola, or NASA (NASA has sponsored 200 teams in 8 years). This book looks at 30 different robot designs all based on the same chassis, and provides in-depth information on the inspiration and the technology that went into building each of them. Each robot is featured in 6-8 pages providing readers with a solid understanding of how the robot was conceived and built. There are sketches, interim drawings, and process shots for each robot.

One of the most hands-on and exciting hobbies and extracurricular activities for students interested in STEM is participating in robotics competitions. This book, newly updated to reflect the latest advances in amateur and professional robotics, including the exploding popularity of the Maker movement, gives readers all they need to enter this competitive and dynamic field. More importantly, readers learn the basics of how to build prize-winning robots, and how to find and enter contests, including local, regional, and national ones.

This book includes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 16th Annual RoboCup International Symposium, held in Mexico City, Mexico, in June 2012. The 24 revised papers presented together with nine champion team papers and one best paper award were carefully reviewed and selected from 64 submissions. The papers present current research and educational activities within the fields of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence with a special focus to robot hardware and software, perception and action, robotic cognition and learning, multi-robot systems, human-robot interaction, education and edutainment, and applications.