Introduction
Welcome to the website for our honours project for 2008. We are Jason Brownbridge and Graeme Smith, two honours students from the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa.
Our project bridges the rapidly converging worlds of computer science and robotics. It is centred around rescue robots, which are playing an increasingly significant and life saving role in search and rescue efforts around the world.
The ability to send a robot into an environment too dangerous for humans is a vital one when searching an earthquake or bomb site. The need for these robots has been increasing annually, since their first major deployment in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centres in New York.
We have developed a system allowing for easy and efficient controlling of these robots, using over the counter hardware - namely components from the popular Nintendo Wii gaming console. These components allow us to drive the robots and move the cameras mounted on them either by manual control or using headtracking.
This system, WiiRobot, was used to conduct a series of experiments to determine the impact of various conditions on operator performance. You can find out more about these experiments here, and the results are discussed here.
Please feel free to look around and see what we've done, and have a look at the many resources available on the downloads page.