Photos: 'Mobot' races test design skills

Teams of undergraduate students, graduate students, and other members of the Carnegie Mellon campus community ready their creations to navigate the 14-gate slalom course. In each category, the mobot that can go through the greatest number of gates in the shortest time wins.

Misumi USA, a subsidiary of Japan's Misumi Corp., offered each contestant $100 of factory automation components. Misumi sells components for motion control, including lenses, camera adapters, and hardware for linear motion and rotary motion. It also sells a kit that uses an infrared LED to illuminate the white line used in the race, and a phototransistor to detect it. But the kit vehicle isn't actually smart enough to navigate the course without further work. (Sunlight offers another strong source of infrared light, for instance, and the kit vehicle isn't capable of traversing sidewalk cracks).