Beyond Botball: A Software Oriented Robotics Challenge for Undergraduate Education

Abstract

Beyond Botball is a thoroughly thought out robotics challenge that varies from year to year. The challenge does not presume specific equipment or software pack-ages – there are many techniques that can be used to accomplish each of the challenge goals. The challenge is distributed freely and is meant to be used as an end of semester project in a robotics or programming class. An open Beyond Botball tournament is held every year in conjunction with the NCER conference. This paper de-scribes the program in more detail and how it has been used in several classes. What is Beyond Botball To understand the origins of Beyond Botball one must first look at the Botball program. Botball (Stein 2003) is an ed-ucational robotics program for Middle and High School stu-dents offered each year by the KISS Institute for Practical Robotics (KIPR).1 Botball traces its origins to the MIT 6.270 contest2 and the AAAI robot building labs (Kadie 1993), many of which were produced by KIPR. Botball grew out of these activities but includes simplifications to make it more age appropriate. Botball augments the technology to allow for a friendlier development environment and more advanced technologies such as robot vision and full PID control (LeGrand et al. 2005). The basic format for the game is to pit two robotics teams against each other. The robots employed must start in response to a signal and operate autonomously there-after, ceasing all activity when time has expired. By playing the game alone, a team can demonstrate robot performance. Playing against an opponent demonstrates robot survivabil-ity. Beyond Botball is a Botball style of competition that pro-vides Botball alumni and other adults the opportunity to con-tinue to participate in a competition based on this kind of robotics.