3rd Robotics Challenge by our Computer Science Department

The 3rd Robotics Challenge for all 3^rd level computer science students entitled “Design and Build a Robotic Ant Colony” was held with great success 22 and 23 January 2015 at our main campus in Thessaloniki.

The two-day event was part of the "Agents and Robotics" unit, led by Dr Kostantinos Dimopoulos.  In the frame of the challenge, students had to build robots and programme them to face a series of challenges each a bit more difficult from the previous one. This year the challenges where leading to the development of robotic ants. Simple robots would search their environments looking for two things: food and their nest. Once a new nest was discovered by an ant, the ant would communicate the information to the other ants. In a similar manner, when an ant located food that it could not pick up, it would also communicate this to the other ants. The aim was for the ants to forage their food.

The students worked in groups and developed a robot to face the given challenges. They had to research similar robots and suggest solutions, build the robots, using the Lego Mindstorms platform, and programme the robots, thus using all the skills and knowledge they acquired from their studies and specifically at the unit.

The students were very excited with this year’s challenge. In fact, they asked for the challenge to be extended and although the event was schedule to last from 10am to 5pm for two-consecutive days, students insisted to continue until the Faculty’s premises were closed.

Finally the challenge was successfully completed by most groups.