Robotics students pit their skills on global stage

Members of the Adelaide Rover Team who will be participating in the IEEE Telepresence competition with Associate Professor John Culton (right).

The University of Adelaide Rover Team has been selected as one of only seven teams globally to participate in the IEEE Telepresence Competition on Saturday, 16 November (ACDT).

"The IEEE Telepresence Competition will test students' ability to remotely control the movement of a rover, located on the side of a mountain in the Mojave Desert, while they are in Adelaide," said Associate Professor John Culton, Director of the Andy Thomas Centre for Space Resources (ATCSR).

"Robotic vehicles will navigate a terrestrial analogue equivalent of a lunar environment.

"The mobility of the rover - and the piloting skills of the team - will be tested on sloped terrain of sand and rocks and flat terrain of sand and lunar regolith simulant."

The competition will test each team's ability to remotely control robotic vehicles, under conditions of delayed signals, with perception provided by on-board sensors. They will each be given a 30-minute window of operation to reach a waypoint on the course and return to base.

Four teams from the US, one from Chile and two from Australia will compete for prizes, including $5000 for the winning team. Finalists were selected to compete based on their experience of teleoperating robots and general team expertise.

The Adelaide Rover team includes Jingyi Qiu, Cooper Whitbread, Olivia Jean Aston, Isabelle Colby and Henry Mellor.

"The Adelaide Rover Team has been presented with the exciting opportunity to compete in IEEE Telepresence Competition in California," said team captain Jingyi Qiu.

"This is an amazing moment to debut the University of Adelaide and South Australia's ascent into the global space industry.

"We will be operating the Helelani Rover which is owned by the Pacific International Space Center for Exploration Systems (PISCES), remotely from our base station at the EXTERRES Mission Control at the North Terrace campus."

The brainchild of NASA Swamp Works Director Rob Meuller, the purpose of the competition is to understand the challenges of remotely operating lunar surface hardware from Earth and the future NASA Gateway Station on lunar-like terrain.

Winners of the will be announced at the California Institute of Technology. Find out more about the IEEE Telepresence Competition.