Israel presents: ROBOTRAFFIC

[Tottanka]

Hey all,

This is the first ever reveal of a new robotics competition starting next year. It is called RoboTraffic, and the main goal is to build small scaled vehicles that drive on the road just like your car, but way safer. It should obey all rules of traffic control, maintain distance and most importantly avoid accidents at any price. The robots are fully autonomous during their entire operation.

The goals are to inspire high-schoolers towards engineering and technology through building and programming a robot, as well as teaching them the basic principles of being a safe driver on the road. Israel is the 2nd highest country in rate of Car Accidents per population, and it is a national crisis. The Technion is looking into solving this problem via semi-auto cars, that will assist humans who drive it when needed.

The Pilot of the project has been presented this week at the opening of a new center at the Technion. The center, named "Leumi Robotics Laboratory" is built to assist and promote any robotics competition in Israel, mostly for high school ages.
The center will support programs like Fire Fighting, RoboCup, It's own new competition - RoboTraffic, and mainly FIRST's FRC and FLL (perhaps later even FTC if that starts in Israel).
The center will provide lectures and presentations of needed relevance to any of those, it will have fabrication abilities, programming options and many proffesionals in those fields at the Technion who will support people.

The center has an open door policy for any robotics team in Israel to come and get immediate help. There will also be weekly sessions teaching high schoolers about Science and Technology.

The RoboTraffic has been developed the past 6 month by Leav (also a member of CD) and myself. We both are FIRST graduates of 06, and are students at the Technion. This year we both acted as the Israeli FTAs for the 09 Tel-Aviv Regional. Here's a short video of our achievements to far.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzgDEimkQRE

Thanks, Liron