A DTU team of five students from the Automation and Control Group, DTU Electrical Engineering, won the Field Robot Event 2012
The Field Robot Event is an international competition focused on using agricultural robots. It is held once a year and is open to all university students. This year the event was held in Venlo, The Netherlands, 28-30 June 2012. There were 18 teams participating from all over Europe (Germany, The Netherlands, Finland, Denmark, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Romania and Turkey). The DTU team of five master students (Nicolai Pedersen, Simon Bagger, Nanna Einarsdóttir, René Tavs Gergersen and Thomas Falkenberg) enrolled the robot 'Rosebot'. Rosebot also came in as the best Danish team at last year's event in Herning, Denmark.
The competition consisted of three tasks of increasing difficulty related to navigation in a field of potted roses. In the first two tasks, 'Basic navigation' and 'Advanced navigation', the DTU team obtained the highest score and was awarded first place. In the third task 'Customer order', where the robots had to locate and retrieve a specific rose in a field of roses, the team achieved second place, only surpassed by the team from the Czech Republic who delivered a flawless performance in this task. Because of the high performance in all three tasks the DTU team was declared the overall winner of Field Robot Event 2012.
Apart from being well prepared and doing good teamwork, the team also emphasises the use of the software framework DTU Mobotware as a source of the team's good performance. 'Having the possibilities to adapt and test the program without having to compile is a great advantage in a competition situation', René Tavs Gregersen says.
More information about Field Robot Event 2012 can be found at http:\www.fieldrobot.nl.
