The Swarmathon: An Autonomous Swarm Robotics Competition

Abstract

The Swarmathon is a swarm robotics programming challenge that engages college students from minority-serving institutions in NASA's Journey to Mars. Teams compete by programming a group of robots to search for, pick up, and drop off resources in a collection zone. The Swarmathon produces prototypes for robot swarms that would collect resources on the surface of Mars. Robots operate completely autonomously with no global map, and each team's algorithm must be sufficiently flexible to effectively find resources from a variety of unknown distributions. The Swarmathon includes Physical and Virtual Competitions. Physical competitors test their algorithms on robots they build at their schools; they then upload their code to run autonomously on identical robots during the three day competition in an outdoor arena at Kennedy Space Center. Virtual competitors complete an identical challenge in simulation. Participants mentor local teams to compete in a separate High School Division. In the first 2 years, over 1,100 students participated. 63% of students were from underrepresented ethnic and racial groups. Participants had significant gains in both interest and core robotic competencies that were equivalent across gender and racial groups, suggesting that the Swarmathon is effectively educating a diverse population of future roboticists.