NASA Prizes for Builder and Flyer Robots 74
FleaPlus writes "NASA has recently announced a couple more X-Prize-style Centennial Challenges. The first is a Telerobotic Construction Challenge, for using a team of robots to assemble structures from building blocks with minimal human intervention. The second is an Planetary Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Challenge, to create a robot which can fly a path using visual navigation and hit ground targets with a probe (no GPS allowed). Rules are still being finalized, with the contests scheduled for 2007. Both prizes are for $250,000, the max Congress is allowing NASA to offer."
Re:Fixed prize limit? (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course you need to know how far it has to fly etc, but IMO it can't cost over £10k to build the airframe. The programme to fly it wouldn't be too hard either, the only hard part is that it needs to know where it is and what orientation it's in . Yhe latter is trivial - use a giro like any other aircraft would. The former could probably be done by taking either a stereo image from two cameras mounted on the wing tips, or useing some sort of downward looking radar, to create a 3D picture of the local terrain, which could then be matched to a map held in memory and a "best-fit" obtained.
Re:Already something like the second one: (Score:2, Interesting)
So the no-GPS thing -is- a real difference between the competitions.
An aside: When I was involved, we didn't have to actually fly -into- the building. This sounds like it tilts the playing field very far in favor of helicopters or other VTOL solutions.. but that's not relevant to the NASA prize.
would you use fundable.org? (Score:2, Interesting)