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Warwick Students Win RoboCup Rescue Championship in Germany

University of Warwick students have won the RoboCup Rescue Championship in Germany. The students developed their rescue robot in a team project bringing together Engineering and Computer Science students at the University of Warwick which entered the 9th RoboCup German Open in Magdeburg (April 15-18 2010).Rescue robot

The Warwick student team won first place overall and best in class for mobility. The robots are designed to crawl over and through difficult terrain or such as destroyed buildings in search of trapped survivors. The German competition put the robot through its paces in a simulated disaster environment which requires robots to demonstrate their capabilities in mobility, sensory perception, planning, mapping, and operator interfaces, while searching for simulated victims in difficult environments. 

One of the Warwick team's competition winning tricks for their rescue robot was their design of a robot arm which has “4 degrees of movement”. This gives that arm more turning flexibility than even the head of an owl and allows the arm to turn and weave in tight situations and change its orientation without having to move the whole robot.

The team’s academic project Directors are Dr Peter Jones from the School of Engineering and Professor Ken Young from the School of Engineering and WMG (Warwick Manufacturing Group) at the University of Warwick. Professor Young says:

“I am delighted at the students' success. This project gives our students hand on experience of solving a real world engineering problem. Not only will they learn practical lessons such as how to integrate leading technology to create a practical working solution they may also come up with their own truly innovative ideas that could be taken up by technology companies and make the students even more sought after as employees of high tech engineering firms.”

Full rescue robot team

Notes for Editors: The teams sponsors include The Maxon Motors, Harwin Interconnect Design & Manufacture,  ITCM – (Innovative Technology for Custom Machinery) Warwick Innovative Manufacturing Research Centre (University of Warwick), WMG (University of Warwick), University of Warwick School of Engineering, Computer Science Department University of Warwick, and RGPhoto.

For further information please contact:

Peter Dunn, Head of Communications, University of Warwick 
Tel:  024 76 523708 Mobile 07767 655860 p.j.dunn@warwick.ac.uk

PR33w  20th April  2010