Fire Truck Saves Day - Not From Fire

A little red fire truck slowly pulls away from its home on a small black square. It appears to be any other children’s toy as it paces back and forth across a large mat with a single circular block on the center. Finally, the truck comes to a stop with its basket hanging over the cylinder. With that, the fire truck picks up the circular block, turns on its warning lights and goes back home to the black box.

The crowd gasps in awe as they begin looking for the remote control. However, one is not in sight. It’s all part of the Autonomous Robot Teams for Multi-Threat Containment project to remove the human element from life-threatening situations.

Students Adam Gerken and Jared Berman built the robot with these situations in-mind. “In a real world setting, these could be used to find things like land mines,” Gerken said. “It’s a lot more safe.”

Gerken and Berman spent two months building and programming the toy fire truck using parallax micro controllers and the BASIC programming language. As the robot traverses back and forth over the “mine field,” it uses ultra sonic sensors to scan the surface until it encounters a mine. It then uses a magnet to pick it up. Finally, the robot finds the perimeter of the area and follows it back to the start.

On-going demonstrations will be held throughout the day.