For the last two months, 15 teams of second-year UBC Engineering Physics students have been building fully automated robots from scratch, and now it’s time to put them to the test — by saving pets from a burning building.
Each robot has two minutes to go through a collapsing animal hospital obstacle course to rescue as many pets — using stuffies as stand-ins — as they can.
Some of the stuffies are hidden and blocked. The team that saves the most wins the game.
“They are using really advanced technologies, like literally the same things you’d find in a self-driving car,” said UBC physics professor Andre Marziali.
“LiDAR, sonar, sensing magnetic fields, some of them are even using AI. They’ve trained a computer on what a stuffie looks like, so a machine can go and pick it up.”
The students seem to have enjoyed the process.
“It’s been a fantastic two months, and I think we took a creative approach and it paid off,” one student told CityNews.
“We spent all day in the lab, but it’s always a great time,” another student said.
Marziali says the skills the students learned from this project will carry them throughout their professional careers.
“Whether they go work in finance, the stock market, nuclear fusion, alternative energy, quantum computing — they will take elements of what they’ve learned today and apply it,” he said.
“It is my immense pleasure to work with the students. They are some of the top students I’ve seen in North America, to be honest.”