Aggie Recon Force, a team of Texas A&M aerospace engineering students, won first prize in the 2nd Annual Lonestar Challenge, a student robotics challenge. The team’s robot, “D Mifflin”, was designed to resemble a box of ordinary office paper.
It looks like your everyday run of the mill box of office paper, even touting in big red letters that it was a bonus case including 2 free reams of paper. Looks, however, can be deceiving.
Underneath the cardboard box that can be found sitting somewhere near the office copy machine was something unexpected — a remotely operated robot outfitted with cameras and a laser-range finder.
It is the creation of Aggie Recon Force, a team of Texas A&M undergraduate aerospace engineering students. Dubbed “D. Mifflin” by the team, it was the winning entry in the 2nd Annual Lonestar Challenge.
The competition is a student robotics challenge among Texas A&M, the University of Texas and a team of three schools — Prairie View A&M, Tennessee State and Southern University — from the Minority Leaders Program.
The challenge, which was hosted on the A&M campus and sponsored by Dr. Alok Das of the Air Force Research Laboratory, presented the team with the task of designing, building and demonstrating a system for covert, in-building surveillance and reconnaissance.
“It is a unique opportunity for the students to develop solutions for some of the challenges the Air Force faces,” said Dr. Helen Reed, a professor in the department of aerospace engineering and the faculty advisor to the group. “I think they recognize that students come in with fresh ideas and real creativity and maybe a simplicity to some of the answers to some complex problems.”
This year the teams were presented with a simulated hostage situation in an office setting and were asked to stealthily enter the office, identify the good and bad persons and provide the Air Force with a detailed map of the rooms and the situation.
“While looking for a method to achieve the stealth component of the competition we wanted to take advantage of the environment,” said Ryan Goodnight, the graduate advisor for Aggie Recon Force. “We looked for an object that would be commonplace, something you wouldn’t question if you saw it there.
“One of the examples we looked at was a trash can, one of those solid dark plastic ones. Another was a refrigerator. Eventually we converged on something that would be as unobtrusive as possible and that would be a cardboard box. Eventually that molded into lets do a paper box because that is bound to be in any office building.”
Once the idea was conceived, the team set about trying to design the robot, a process that took a little more than five months from start to finish. About three months of that time was spent on designing the robot, with the building of it taking up the remainder.
The remotely operated robot featured omni-directional drive with mecanum wheels, live video that was fed to the students operating the robot in another room to provide target identification, audio capture and communications relay powered by a laptop that was onboard the robot.
Unless the box was lifted off the robot, no one, other than the designers of the robot, would know what was underneath.
“We decided that instead of making it so it wouldn’t be seen, make it so if it was seen it wouldn’t be recognized as a robot,” said Colin Phillips, a freshman team member. “We settled on the paper box because you always see those sitting around in office buildings.”
Aggie Recon Force’s entry in the competition was judged to be the best by the panel f judges that included members of the Air Force Research Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center and Southwest Research Institute.
The Air Force noted that Texas A&M had the best solution to stealth and quietness, had thoughtfully analyzed and limited the robot’s scope and nailed the target specifications, had designed a robust and reliable system, and had implemented an effective integrated command and control structure.
The Minority Leaders Program team finished second, while the team from the University of Texas was third.
Texas A&M’s team, which received support from Lockheed Martin, was led by freshman Bishoy Khalil, and consisted of Phillips, freshmen Anthony Dominguez and Sean Merrill, and seniors Mike Massicotte and David Taylor. In addition to Goodnight, John Brashear assisted the team.
