Johns Hopkins Robotics Team
Creativity Unleashed
Andrew Rohland ’12 always assumed there would be an undergraduate robotics team at Johns Hopkins. After all, the university is home to one of the premier robotics and computer sensing research groups in the world. And Rohland, whose Southern Maryland high school’s robotics team made it to the national finals in the Georgia Dome, figured there would be lots of like-minded students at the Whiting School of Engineering—classmates who enjoyed the challenge of working together to build and program robots and compete against teams from other schools for cash prizes and bragging rights.
But when he arrived on campus in Fall 2008, the mechanical engineering major learned that the university hadn’t had a robotics team in years. So he decided to start one. “Robotics gives students practice for ‘real world’ engineering and hopefully might even bring professors and undergraduates together for research opportunities,” says Rohland ’12. “I think a lot of students at Hopkins want to be in an extracurricular activity that is related to their field of study and more companies are looking for that as well.”
Rohland was surprised when 40 students who share his love for robotics joined the new team this fall. Faculty advisor and computer science professor Gregory Hager was surprised, too, but also pleased since he knows the experience allows undergraduates to draw on their knowledge of mechanical and electrical engineering, computer science, math, and physics and gain valuable experience. “The hands-on experience students get in the Robotics Team is as different from what they do in class as doing a thesis is from doing homework,” Hager says. “They get creative opportunities to collaborate and pool what they know to develop a complete system, then see it in action.”
On a recent evening, team members met in the Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics to work on designs for two of the three competitions they plan to participate in this year. One group, led by Venkatesh Srinivas ’09, deliberated over the number of thrusters to buy for their entry for an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle competition sponsored by AUVSI (Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International). Their vehicle must perform a series of tasks underwater and the more thrusters they use, the easier the submarine will be to control. Despite having only $1,000 in their budget at the moment, the group decided to buy three thrusters, increase their fundraising, and cut back on their future pizza ordering. “Participating in these competitions is fun because you get to play with stuff that you hear about but you don’t understand until you actually do it,” Srinivas says.
Meanwhile, freshman Sinan Ozdemir led the second group in designing an entry for the AUVSI International Aerial Robotics Competition (IARC). Their task: To create a fully autonomous helicopter that can navigate a building, drop the flash drive it is carrying and pick up another, and avoid detection by laser trip wires. Their secret weapon? Sonar. “We’re not sure anyone has ever used sonar before,” says Ozdemir, a computer science major. “It’s a really cool idea that will get everyone’s attention. Even if we don’t win, people will remember it.”
Rohland is already thinking beyond the competitions, however. “It would be neat to have a robotic tour guide at Hopkins,” he says. “I know we could do it.”