RobMech 2012

The 2012 Mobile Robot Competition (MRC) explored the opportunity of aligning its self with the NASA Annual Lunabotics Mining Competition. The Challenges of Space and of underground mining are similar (see a paper at the 2011 conference on this) and the opportunity to attract a wider audience and more participants to the competition is attractive. However, the level of success and the desire to enable the universities to be abel to use the same platform for the 2012 competition has lead to an unchanged offering for the competition.

The CSIR Centre for Mining Innovation (CMI) has taken a keen interest in robotics research in South Africa as a solution to unlocking extensive gold resources currently uneconomically mineable in South African gold mines. The South African Space Resources Association (SASRA) believes that such research overlaps with the research of the space mining industry, and early collaboration would be mutually beneficial.

To support the above mentioned research, the competition took on a mining theme in 2011. All the tasks in the competition mimic in some way a task that could be automated in an underground autonomous mine of the future. The 2012 competition will be exactly the same as 2011 in the task description, but the marking will be made more stringent.

The annual Robotics and Mechatronics Symposium (RobMech 2012) will again host the competition. Due to the anticipated increased interest, the competition will take a full day of the conference (Monday 26th November 2012), as opposed to a half day as in 2011.