Tag: Robotics

WVU Team Wins $100K at NASA Competition

NASA has awarded $100,000 to a team from West Virginia University for completing a robotics challenge.

  NASA says the objective of the challenge is to encourage innovations in autonomous navigation and robotics technologies. Teams were required to demonstrate their robots could locate and collect geologic samples from wide and varied terrains, operating without human control.

The team of 16 students worked for 18 months to prepare its robot to autonomously seek out samples on a 20-acre field over a two-hour period and return them to a designated point.

The samples included a sample known previously to the team and one introduced the day of the competition.

The Centennial Challenges program is part of NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, which is developing, testing and flying hardware for future missions.

Procter & Gamble to Team with Eastern Panhandle Colleges to Build Workforce

Groundbreaking for the new Procter & Gamble Company in Berkeley County is expected to be this fall.

Stephen Christian is the executive director of the Berkeley County Development Authority. In a speech to the community Friday, Christian said negotiations for what became the plans to bring Procter & Gamble into the county began in fall of 2012.

West Virginia competed with two other states for the company, with its biggest rival being in Pennsylvania. It will take two to three years before the company is operational, but once completed could cover 1 to 3 million square feet and employ over 700 full-time employees making anywhere from $40,000 to $70,000 a year.

Christian says the jobs offered will be in high-tech fields working with computers and robotics.

“It’s my understanding that the Procter & Gamble Human Resources Team is working directly with Blue Ridge CTC, and with Shepherd [University], and with James Rumsey [Technical College] on the beginnings of how those things are going to be implemented, how they’re going to manifest themselves, and having a background in some manufacturing, or some engineering, or having a background in some software management and control management for machining is probably going to be advantageous.”

Christian says the company has not yet revealed which products will be produced at the Berkeley County site, but says there will be a variety of brands.

24-Hour Robotics Competition Kicks Off in Morgantown

High school teams from all over the country are pitting their robots against each other in a series of events designed to test their ability to work together and endure.

In an effort to give kids a taste of real-world circumstances, high school robotics teams are challenged to raise funds, design a team “brand,” and build and program a robot to perform prescribed tasks against a field of competitors—all with limited resources, and time limits.

Their regular season begins in February and culminates in the world championships in  late April. But this week a special off-season event is being held in Morgantown, hosted by Mountaineer Area Robotics, team 2614. And the competition is unique.

“We’ve decided to do the world’s first endurance test,” says Earl Scime, the Mountaineer Area Robotics team’s mentor (each team has one).

Scime is also Associate Vice President for Research and Economic Development at West Virginia University. He says the winning teams in this competition will each get to nominate one of their teammates for a full scholarship to WVU.

The competition is being streamed live.

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