Guest Contributor
Five months after being awarded first prize in the 2022-2023 SICK $10K Challenge as well as receiving their master’s degrees in robotics from the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, the winning group behind the SauberBOT project was flown to SICK’s headquarters in Germany to accept their prize.
SICK, a global manufacturer of industrial sensors, hosts a yearly challenge for university student groups across the US and Canada to incorporate one of their LiDAR sensors into a project designed to “solve a problem, create a solution and bring a new application that utilizes the SICK scanner in any industry”. The 2022-2023 competition was dubbed the “TiM$10K Challenge” at the time because the fifteen participating student groups were provided with a SICK TiM-P 270 ° 2D LiDAR sensor to use in their inventions. Three student groups from GRASP were among the 15 groups selected to participate, and two of these groups won first and third prize!
The first place winners were Aadith Kumar Jayakumar, Aadit Patel, Pranav Prashant Shah, Sharon Richu Shaji, and Rithwik Udayagiri, who invented a robot they called SauberBOT. Named after the German word for “to clean”, SauberBOT is an autonomous robot that aims to assuage the impact of a shortage of labor in the cleaning industry by scanning a predefined geofenced region to identify and collect discarded litter.
This story was written By Jillian Mallon. To read the full article, please visit the GRASP Laboratory.