Undergrad-built Robots Play "Operation"

jnakane writes "UBC Engineering Physics students pit prototype operation robots against each other for prizes and bragging rights in the 7th Annual Robot Competition. Offering solutions to handle delicate body parts on a 6-foot long version of the playing surface resembling the board game "Operation" (including the "shock" buzzer), the second-year students designed and built autonomous surgical robots to remove body organs reliably and quickly (well, most of the time). You can also see video footage."

"Macro" Operation, that is

[newsdee]

I don't mean to belittle the efforts that went into building these, but I was a bit disappointed to see that it was not the real "Operation" game but some big table with big holes in it. The robots use some type of magnet to pick up metallic objects instead of tweezers to pick up small plastic things. The holes are also big squares instead of the squiggly holes that make the original interesting.

Of course, making an autonomous robot that plays the real thing would be an order of magnitude harder. Hopefully some of the contestants had so much fun they'll go on to try to create that sometime in the future.

Amazing what kids are doing these days

[jparp]

I happened to be visiting UBC when this was going on, and my roommate in the residence had a robot in the competition... so I went to go check it out.

Of course robotics engineering is not as difficult as it used to be, with better COTS sensors, affordable fab tools, an expanding open source robotics community, and of course Moore's Law...

Regardless, it was really incredible to see what _second_ year students are capable of these days. Also, lots of credit should go to the ambitious profs who have been organizing the course for the past few years.

Artificial Shock

[Doc Ruby]

These robots will be really interesting when they can simulate in themselves the feeling of recoiling in shock and horror when a long run of successful extractions suddenly ends when they touch their instrument to patient, and that damn buzzer goes off. And it hands the tweezers to its bratty little sister for her easy win.

Ole' UBC ECE 474 Robot Competition

[Anonymous Coward]

UBC Electrical & Computer Engineering 474 used to have student robot competitions back in the 1998-2000 timeframe. They had autonomous maze mapping robot and treasure hunt competitions with a Motorola HC11 brain. The current project is at http://courses.ece.ubc.ca/474/index.html [ece.ubc.ca]. Previous ones at http://courses.ece.ubc.ca/474/previous_termreports.html [ece.ubc.ca].

Re:6 weeks !

[boris the engineer]

At Cambridge University us Undergraduate engineers do a similar robotics project in 4 weeks on top of normal lectures. It's manic, but do-able. (Teams of 6 students) See: http://www.eng.cam.ac.uk/DesignOffice/idp/index.html [cam.ac.uk] Of course, the project is run twice a term so all of the computing equipment and hardware you might need to build the robot is readily to hand - that makes a world of difference to speeding up development.