The second annual Autonomous Robot Speedway Competition competition will be held on the University of Maryland, College Park, campus on Saturday, October 24, 2009, from 11 a.m. - 2 p.m. A total of 12 student teams will compete. The competition will be held in the XX parking lot, next to the Computer Science Instructional Center (CSIC) Building (#406). The rain location for the event is the rotunda area of the Jeong H. Kim Engineering Building. Students, faculty, staff, and members of the public are invited to attend, and there is no admission charge for spectators. The event is organized and sponsored by the Washington, DC/Northern Virginia Chapter of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers Robotics and Automation Society (IEEE-RAS) and the Clark School's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE).

Each team's autonomous robot will race around an elliptical course lined with traffic cones. The robots' autonomous navigation is comprised of obstacle avoidance, dead reckoning, telemetry, onboard sensor processing, computer vision, and dealing with uncertainty in environmental conditions such as uneven lighting conditions, uneven surface, and unevenly spaced cones. This systems engineering exercise provides students engaged in the competition with an opportunity to practice an integrated, interdisciplinary approach to solving problems and optimizing performance.

The teams competing in the competition will include students from the Robotics@Maryland student organization and Prof. Gil Blankenship's 408I Autonomous Robotics Capstone Design Course.

For more information about the event, please visit the following website:

http://www.ece.umd.edu/arsc