TRINITY COLLEGE'S FIRE-FIGHTING ROBOT CONTEST
Trinity College in Hartford, Ct., will sponsor its fourth annual Fire-Fighting Home-Robot contest--the largest public robotics contest held in the United States--on Sunday, April 20.
Organizers of the event say they envision home fire prevention of the future going a technological leap beyond smoke detectors, sprinklers and fire extinguishers. They see homes of the 21st century equipped with affordable fire-fighting robots.
Contestants must design and build an autonomous robot (one that receives no commands via remote control) that can find and extinguish a fire in a single-story home. The winner is determined by navigating a maze which represents the first floor of a house, avoiding obstacles, and putting out a fire (a candle) in the least amount of time.
The event, which is open to the public and to entrants from any age level, draws dozens of competitors nationally and internationally. Contestants regularly include elementary-school students, college and university teams, MIT professors, amateur inventors and professional engineers. The top prize is $1000.
The 1996 winning entry was created by a team of six senior robotics students from Central Connecticut State University. The winning robot's flame-detector circuit utilized an infrared phototransistor as a sensor; its extinguisher was created from parts of a bicycle pump that contained a CO2 cartridge.
Contest co-director David Ahlgren, a profesor of engineering at Trinity, sees the contest as the laboratory that will produce an effective fire-fighting home robot. "It's a real possibility," he says, "and it becomes more apparent each year as the entries get better and better."
Ahlgren adds: "I'm certain that something will come out of this eventually that will be on the market for the average home-- and it's just as likely that it will be an entry from a 16-year- old whiz kid from Idaho as from an engineering professor from MIT."
The day-long contest is the main focus of a weekend-long event, which includes a robotics seminar and exhibition and a movie with a robotics theme. Saturday's festivities will include the Connecticut invention convention, bringing together K-12 inventors and their inventions from across the state.
For more information, contact David Ahlgren at 860-297-2588 (o) or 860-633-5665 (h).
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