Hey remember us?

Well after the hurricane Nick and I had a job to do, in Hawaii! See we support an International Robotics competition called RobotX. It takes place every 2 years and offers students and industry professionals a chance to test new and interesting autonomous robotics solutions in a real-world environment. Over the course of a week teams from across the world compete against static and dynamic course elements. And it’s not them competing, it’s the robot they designed. See, it’s full hands off here, the boat has to navigate, observe and make decisions all on its own. They start with a standard base platform, and have to add propulsion, power, processing, sensing, and everything in between. Challenges include automated docking, obstacle avoidance, underwater localization, and marine navigation. 

And an important part of their solutions is C2C, or Command and Control. The wireless link needed to R/C their boat (between runs) download logs, change and upload code and stream real time telemetry between the robot and the developers/operator. It’s always been a struggle to have so many teams (15 this past year) in such a small space all trying to use Wifi for this task. I once measured the noise floor at -70 in the venue one year.

But there’s been one clear, inexpensive and reliable brand of radio for the task, but you could have guessed it right?

And as event staff, we rely on Ubiquiti as well. We had a Unifi system on site providing internet to the teams across the venue via 13 Unifi mesh Aps, 2 Unifi Switches, 2 Edge Switches and an EdgeRouter. We also have a mixture of Airmax Nanostations and Airmax Bullets for the links required to control the dynamic elements of the course out on the water.

This year National University of Singapore took home the grand prize. In 2016 the University of Florida won, and in 2014 a joint team of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Olin College of Engineering took top spot. 

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