Our Crowdfunding Groups
Mercury Robotics Club has the overall goal to promote a passion for robotics here at OSU, and we do that in several ways. Our members have the opportunity to work on projects sponsored by professors to assist with their research, propose their own project, and this year they can work on our newest competition goal: the IGVC AutoNAV competition!
Competition objective:
"A fully autonomous unmanned ground robotic vehicle must negotiate around an outdoor obstacle course under a prescribed time while maintaining a minimum of speed of one mph over a section and a maximum speed limit of five mph, remaining within the lane, and avoiding the obstacles on the course. Judges will rank the entries that complete the course based on shortest adjusted time taken. In the event that a vehicle does not finish the course, the judges will rank the entry based on longest adjusted distance traveled. Adjusted time and distance are the net scores given by judges after taking penalties, incurred from obstacle collisions and boundary crossings, into consideration."
For more information, the IGVC rules and media can be found here: http://www.igvc.org/index.htm
Our custom embroidered Mercury polo shirts were our first fundraiser for the club! They cost $15 each for members and were custom embroidered by Kelly Lewis, our vice president.
We use these to teach new members with smaller projects and we use them for independently proposed small robotics projects for the members!
Currently on our campuslink (including advisors and graduate mentors) we have 36 members!
Our members are dedicated, so our meetings often run long. We ensure that no member goes without dinner by providing pizza at all our meetings. Your donation funds that dinner and keeps our members fed and learning!
We intend to use the Intel real sense D455 camera to do local mapping of the course as our robot travels! Your contribution would allow us to purchase this camera and get started on tuning that path planning!
We also want to get the Velodyne VLP-16 Puck LITE to use as a 2D Lidar. This would allow us to generate a pointcloud of obstacles on the course! Additionally, this is the same goal we need to meet to register for the IGVC AutoNAV competition.
The Ouster OS0 is our dream 3D lidar for this competition. If we were able to utilize this hardware, we wouldn't even need an additional stereoscopic camera. This precision and reliability provided by the OS0 is incomparable!