If your wondering why this is getting screen time here, I'll tell you: Two of last years Paladins worked on this project:

Sam Bell, the Lusty Wrench himself, was DEXTER's mechanic. Sam is registered to ride with us again this year.

Wyatt Newman, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at CWRU, was (is?) the team leader of Team Case, made up of more than 50 students and faculty at the Case School of Engineering who worked on DEXTER. Hey, Wyatt, are you signing up for bike MS this year?

* * * * * * * * * * *

Dear Friends of DEXTER and teammates,

I'll start by introducing myself. My name is Brad Hughes - an
ex-UrbanChallenge-ite from TeamCASE. Andy Allen, the old moderator for
the Friends-of-DEXTER list has ventured off to work in industry at Vecna
Robotics in Boston, MA. Several other team members have been graduating
and on the quest to get jobs. We wanted to maintain communication with
the Friends-of-DEXTER with news about robotics at Case... so I have been
appointed the new "moderator" of the list :-) .

An exciting thing with respect to TeamCASE and our long-over venture to
the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge has finally come about. Discovery Science
channel, after a long period of post-production of the series, will air
Robocars. The six-week series will air starting on July 14th at 10pm; a
new episode will air every Monday after that for six weeks. The first
four episodes are each one hour and will follow 10 selected teams as
they compete in the challenge from start to finish. The fifth episode is
a two-hour summary of the first four episodes, and the sixth episode
talks about the application of autonomous robotics to the up and coming
autonomous vehicle industry.

A little birdie told me that Case will be primarily seen in Episode two,
airing first on July 21st at 10:00pm.

The Case Alumni Association is holding an event to view this second
episode with the remaining team members, faculty, staff, and Friends of
DEXTER. The event will be at Johnny Malloy's in Coventry on the 21st at
9:00pm. There will be a cash bar and a free pizza buffet. After
mingling, the show will be aired on the big screen for everyone to
enjoy. I've forwarded an email from Jillian DeLong, the CAA
representative for the event. She asks that you RSVP to her directly as
soon as possible. You can reach her via email at
jillian.delong@casealum.org. You can also call her at (216) 231-4567 x 2223.

So, mark your calendars for all six episodes and let Jillian know if
you'll be coming! I hope to see you there!

I also want to mention CWRU Cutter, a robot whose name is pronounced
"crew cutter." A team of a few students, led by Dr. Quinn from Case’s
Biologically Inspired Center for Robotics Research, entered the ION
Autonomous Lawn mowing competition. ION, or the Institute of Navigation,
is a professional organization that allows collaboration between the
experts of localization and planning. What better to test the
integration of GPS and other sensors but an autonomous lawn mowing
competition!

The competition, held in early June in Dayton, OH, was comprised of
eleven initial teams. There were eight teams to show. After a long
couple of weeks of work and a final rush at the end to get everything
working (seems to be the case with robot projects), we placed third in
the competition. We were also happy to have achieved the best combined
technical report and presentation scores out of all teams. We learned a
lot from the competition… including that we undersized our DC motors and
had a deck that was about one inch too low. Our thrifty Hardware Expert,
Jon Beno, hacked some metal on site and got the robot in a moving state.
The team (including myself) were thrilled to place for our first year in
the competition, and are looking forward to entering the competition
again next year.

Our sponsor company, MTD Products, was also pretty happy with our
performance and (is hopefully) going to continue supporting our team for
the next year. For those of you that don’t know, MTD Products
manufactures Cub Cadet, Troy Bilt, Yard Machine, and most Craftsman
power equipment. Their product line varies from riding mowers to push
mowers to string trimmers to log splitters to snow throwers.

Best Regards,
Bradley Hughes
Case Western Reserve University
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science