Are you looking for some interesting robotics projects to work on during the summer? Would you like to build some robots and get some hands-on training in machining, soldering, and programming? Come to the University of Toronto Robotics Association (UTRA) Summer Kick-Off Meeting! The details are as follows:

Date: May 23, Thursday

Time: 6pm - 7pm

Location: GB 244

If you are interested but could not make it to the meeting, you can always subscribe to our mailing list:

http://www.utra.ca/subscribe, or contact us at utra@utra.ca. 

See you there,

UTRA Execs

Are you interested in joining one of the most vibrant club executive teams in Skule? Nominate yourself now for an executive position in UTRA! 

UTRA will be holding an election to recruit the executive team for fiscal year 2013-2014.  Click here for detailed description of the positions.  The followings are the positions available:

- Vice President

- Treasurer

- Fundraising Director

- Internal Relations Director

- Marketing Director

- Newsletter Director

- Webmaster

- Sumo Robot Team Project Manager

- Combat Robot Team Project Manager

- Autonomous Robot Team Project Manager

- RepRap 3D Printer Team Project Manager

- Mechanical Department Lead

- Electrical Department Lead

- Embedded Department Lead

- Software Department Lead

Details of the election are as follows:

Date: April 5th, Friday

Time: 6pm - 8pm

Location: TBA

If you are interested in running for any of the positions, please send an email to <utra@utra.ca> with the subject line "UTRA Election: Position title" no later than April 3, Wednesday, and include your full name, discipline and year in the email. You will then be invited to the election where you are expected to deliver an election speech through an confirmation email. If however you are not able to attend the election, you can provide your election speech in the email, which will be read out at the election.

Please note that it is not required to have previous involvement in UTRA in order to run for any of the positions above. For more information regarding the positions, please visit our website at: <www.utra.ca>

Important PDF Documents for those interested in applying:

Position Descriptions

UTRA Executive Hierarchy

Project Descriptions

Facebook Event Page: https://www.facebook.com/events/121649764691240/

UTRA Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/UTRA.ca

Sincerely,

UTRA Execs

Join our Facebook campaign and help spread the word to classmates and friends! https://www.facebook.com/events/115292365330280

How to vote?

Voting website:  http://voting.utoronto.ca/ 

Voting Period: March 28 at 8:00am - April 3 at 8:00pm

UTRA is looking to renew its engineering student levy. The student levy has been the core to UTRA's success in the previous 2 years (2011-now) bringing home 1 Gold, 1 Silver and 2 Bronze medals in a short period of time. 

The levy helps fund the team by providing us with the resources and components to needed to build these winning designs. As our club grows, we are always looking for more robots to designs and more competitions to win!

A Brief History on UTRA

UTRA was started in 2002 focused solely on the combat robot. Now UTRA, has grown to over 100 members working on various robots including the Gold winning Combat robot, ART/UGV, IGVC, Sumo, and RepRap.

UTRA has been very successful, winning a number of awards over the years

• In 2012, UTRA won Bronze with the Autonomous Robot at IARRC Robot Racing Competition
• In 2012, UTRA won Bronze with the 120lbs Combat Robot at RoboGames
• In 2011, UTRA won Gold with the 120lbs Combat Robot at RoboGames
• In 2011, UTRA won Silver with the Autonomous Robot at UGV (Unmanned Ground Vehicle) Competition
• In 2010, UTRA won Gold with the 120lbs Combat Robot at RoboGames
• In 2009, UTRA won Bronze with the 120lbs Combat Robot at RoboGames
• In 2008, UTRA won Bronze with the 120lbs Combat Robot at RoboGames

The in-house sumo competition was designed for junior members to gain experience in building their own robot. Every year, teams are provided with some parts, instructions and training from UTRA's department leads for how to design and build their own robot. The robots are then pitted against one another in the ring to see which design reigns supreme.

Funding is obviously an important factor and a student levy will help provide support for theses projects as UTRA looks to win more competitions.

The UTRA ART team would like to thank Tsubaki Canada for providing us with some awesome drive chains for the automonous rover.

Heres are some pictures of members unboxing it!

Check out their site if you are looking for chains, sprockets, bushings and more: http://tsubaki.ca/

The RepRap team is excited to start the new year printing! We picked up a sleek, new printer from our friends over at www.eckertech.com. To test this new gadget out, we want to let the first 5 people who contact the RepRap lead have a free print*. More to come in the new year :D

*Not free as speech, rather free as in beer. 

You can print a small to medium sized object in ABS black. Since this is a bit of an experiment, we are only printing very small things to start. No sets of RepRap parts will be printed yet.

Are you interested in robotics? Would you like to build some robots and get some hands-on training in machining, soldering, and programming? Come to the University of Toronto Robotics Association (UTRA) Kick-Off Meeting! The details are as follows:

Date: September 19th, Wednesday

Time: 6pm - 7pm

Location: SF 1105

*Pizza and pop will be served*

If you are interested but could not make it to the meeting, you can always visit our website and subscribe to our mailing list:

http://www.utra.ca/subscribe, or contact us at utra@utra.ca. 

See you there,

UTRA Execs

With great joy I report that UTRA's ART team has won bronze in the IARRC competition on July 28, 2012. IARRC is an annual autonomous robot racing competition that was held in University of British Columbia . The competition was fun, the city was beautiful and the hosts were very hospitable. It was an enthralling experience for the team. 

IARRC had 3 major components. One was the technical report and presentation of our robot. Second was a drag race, where the challenge is to autonomously traverse a straight path and the robot that reaches the finish line first wins the race. Third was the circuit race, where the challenge was to autonomously navigate a circuit defined by cones grass and curbs. The circuit had obstacles, traffic lights, stop signs and a tunnel. The robot to traverse the circuit in the least time and least number of faults, such as hitting cones, not stoping at traffic light etc, would win the circuit race. UTRA's robot had many unexpected results in the competition. We had the highest score in the technical report and presentation. We were second in the drag race, which is quite a surprise given our robot's top speed is around 1 m/s. The biggest surprise of all was that we finished 3rd in the circuit race, because our practice runs just before the competition were flawless! There were a number of unpredicted external factors that affected our algorithm. For example, the LIDAR was detecting obstacles in locations were there weren't any obstacles. This never happened during our test runs in Toronto. Our first guess was that the pavement was slanted, but later we were told that the sun can affect the LIDAR as well. In addition the algorithm that we were using for navigation used a localization method that did not work very well in open spaces, which they have a lot in Vancouver, but not so much in Toronto.  So, we had to write another navigation algorithm from scratch on the night before the competition. Needless to say, it was a sleepless night for us. During the competition, the sun was brighter than when we calibrated our vision algorithm thus that did not perform very well. And to make matters worse, they added a tunnel to the course that was too narrow and short so if our robot bumped into anything in the tunnel then the cameras on the robot will misalign only to decapitate the vision even further. Even with these issues  ,and a sleepless night followed by a showerless day, we were able to finish the course and secure 3rd place. We have learnt a lot from this experience and from the people that we have met. We will use this knowledge to make appropriate changes to the robot. 

UTRA would like to sincerely thank the engineering faculty at University of Toronto; our sponsors, SolidWorks, Pololu, Atmel , for their support. We couldn't have done this without you.  

We apologize for the extended downtime to utra.ca. The ISP that hosted our site (as well as our hosting company) went down; the reason still unknown to us. This resulted in the site being unavailable to access, emails to utra.ca bouncing back to the sender and mailing lists being disabled.

Currently, the site is restored to an old backup however some of the content on the site may be missing or out of date. Bear with us as we try and recover our data from the host.

Thanks for your patience throughout the downtime..

Update: All data has been restored!

April 20-22, 2012: 16 Countries, 59 Events, 238 Teams, 710 Entries, 682 Robots, and 1039 Engineers

Bronze Medal - 120 lbs Combat Robots

The University of Toronto Robotics Association (UTRA.ca) just returned from RoboGames in California, the largest robotics competition in North America. UTRA won a bronze medal in the 120-lbs class of combat robots and proudly returned home with the only Canadian medal at the competition. With this award, UTRA has been on the podium for five (5) consecutive years! UTRA draws its members from many disciplines within the faculty of engineering and teaches students to collaborate with other departments

(From the Left to Right) Rehman Merali, Paul Giampuzzi, Wen Cheng Chong, Merrick Zoubeiri, Wilson Tan

(More Videos and Pictures coming soon!)

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/04/robogames-2012-gallery/?pid=3257

Check out RoboGames for the results.