Competitions

Flinders University and Team Australis2 has participated in many competition over the past years. Competitions are not only exciting and challenging but also give teams the opportunity to interact with like minded people and tackle real world problems.

Maritime RobotX 2014

Marina Bay, Singapore

20-26 October 2014

In 2014, the Martime RobotX Challenge was hosted in Marina Bay, Singapore. Located in the southern shores of Singapore, this area provided a prominent but sheltered area where public could view the whole event.

Competition Challenges

The competition comprised of a diverse variety of tasks which had to be completed autonomously. Some individual tasks included: obstacle navigation, docking and underwater beacon localisation. The autonomous surface vessel would enter a competition course and perform all the tasks it could. Points were awarded based on time to complete, accuracy and tasks completed.

TopCat at Singapore

In 2014 ToCcat was taken to Singapore with a team of honours students and staff from Flinders University and the Australian Maritime College. The team had developed software and hardware to solve most of the challenges however prior to the competition TopCat had very few on water hours. This was the biggest challenge for the team at Singapore as complete systems integration and debugging had to be performed onsite.

Lessons Learnt

Attending the competition was a great experience. It was exciting, fun, challenging and sometimes stressful but the team enjoyed it all.

While at the competition many challenges arose and were solved in the field. Some of the key lessons learned from this experience include:

  • field testing is key: while our system design was excellent, not completing lots of on water testing let us down.
  • heat and humidity are challenging: the team had difficulty with moisture on camera lenses and overheated computers.
  • check your math and check it again: the team had to reposition the batteries during the competition due to a miscalculation in design

Sand Island – O’ahu, Hawaii

09-20 December 2016

The 2016 Maritime RobotX Challenge was hosted at Sand Island on O’ahu, Hawaii. Team Australis2 was proud to once again represent Flinders University and South Australia.

Competition Challenges

This years competition consisted of eight tasks. These tasks included:

  • Navigation and Control
  • Identify Symbols and Docking
  • Detect and Deliver
  • Finding Totems and avoiding obstacles
  • Scanning Code on Totem
  • Underwater shape identification
  • Find the break
  • Acoustic Pinger-based Transit

Lessons Learnt

what did we learn from this comp

  • testing hardware/software
  • KISS – scope of the project
  • programming nuts and bolts

overall we did things and stuff

Virtual RobotX Challenge

November 22nd 2019

The 2019 VRX competition was hosted online. Team Australis2 was proud to once again represent Flinders University and South Australia.

Team TopCat has always heavily used simulation when developing their competition vehicles.  When the 2019 Virtual RobotX competition was announced, the team was involved in not only the competition itself but also the development of the competition environment, with team member Joanthan Wheare submitting pull requests to the environment as well as providing bug reports.
The VRX competition allowed the team to concentrate on developing its autonomy solution, in particular investigating areas of classification and sensor fusion.  The team also experiemented with new methods for software development, including learning about distributed development.

Competition Challenges

This years competition consisted of eight tasks. These tasks included:

  • Station Keeping
  • Way finding
  • Landmark Localization and Characterization
  • Traverse Navigation Channel
  • Dock
  • Scan and Dock

Lessons Learnt

  • Manage expectations and account for unknowns. Rather than trying to complete a program that would complete the desired task ezactly as expected, recognize the tasks are dyanamic and are unpredictable, and attempt to design an algorithm that is able to take the internal and external factors to get the best output.
  • Ensure a code repository and code history is maintained. Preventing users from keeping local files that can cause problems when trying to merge old and new code.

Virtual RobotX Challenge

12th April 2022

The 2022 VRX competition was hosted online. Team Australis2 are proud to once again represent Flinders University and South Australia.

The 2022 team is almost completely comprised of undergraduates who are new to field robotics.  As such, the 2022 Virtual RobotX was an opportunity for the team to learn about the techniques required for development of field robots and the fundamentals of software development with the Robotics Operating System.
The software codebase of previous years was examined and overhauled, and new approaches were examined for mission planning.  Overall the result was succesful, with the team doing particularly well in the Gymkhana task.

Competition Challenges

This years competition consisted of eight tasks. These tasks included:

  • Station Keeping
  • Way finding
  • Landmark Localization and Characterization
  • Wildlife Encounter and Avoid
  • Channel Navigation, Acoustic Beacon Localization and Obstacle Avoidance
  • Scan and Dock and Deliver

Lessons Learnt

  • Setting realistic timelines. When starting the project we underestimated the challenges that occured and the time it would take to complete a challenge.
  • Breaking tasks into smaller tasks. Rather than trying to complete tasks with one huge program we ended up breaking tasks into smaller subtasks that could be completed easier.