UDM team wins international robotics competition
A team from University of Detroit Mercy’s College of Engineering & Science recently took first place in an international robotics competition.
The team, which was a collaboration between UDM and Michigan Technological University, won this year’s Benchmark Autonomous Robot Navigation (BARN) Challenge at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers International Conference on Robotics and Automation.
The BARN Challenge is designed to advance autonomous navigation in constrained environments and evaluates the performance of navigation systems in both simulated and real-world settings.
A navigation algorithm, developed by Associate Professor Mariam Faied, Adjunct Professor Mohan Krishnan and Amna Mazen ’24, helped the UDM team to its first-place finish.
During the simulation stage of the competition, teams navigated their Clearpath Jackal robot through 300 simulated environments using data collected by LiDAR — a remote sensing method that uses laser light to determine the presence, shape and distance of objects.
Top performing teams then tested their systems on physical obstacle courses.
The algorithm used was initially developed as part of Mazen’s doctoral research at UDM, which she continued refining as a professor at Michigan Tech.