A competition at the University of British Columbia recently gave engineering physics students the opportunity to showcase their skills while rescuing “pets” in distress. Teams of students spent their summer designing autonomous robots for a competition in which they sent their robots to save pets—represented by plush toys—from a burning animal hospital. The robots worked without human control to find the animals, avoid obstacles, and rescue them in a variety of different ways, including carrying them out, tossing them out a window, or dropping them down a construction chute. “This is the start of a practical and theoretical skill set that will carry them through to working careers at the forefront of technology,” said UBC Engineering Physics Project Lab Director Dylan Gunn.
