‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ I’d like to slightly modify that statement to ‘Any solution to a technology problem that works for an inexplicable reason is indistinguishable from magic’. Here’s why: The S.A.R.T. recently acquired a pair of stereoscopic cameras for use in creating a 3D model of the environment, complete with...Read More

One of the requirements for the Major competition is to generate a top-down floor plan of the room in which the test takes place. Ideally, this would happen automatically, however until we get that working we can use the exported 3D model created by the ZED Mini and a bit of post-processing in Blender to...Read More

Today I worked mostly on testing and familiarizing myself with our development robot, which we as a team named ‘Bender’. To begin the day, I began driving Bender through our various practice courses whilst only navigating using the cameras. I then proceeded to navigate through looking directly at the robot with my own eyes. This...Read More

Big success today as part of our community outreach program “S.A.R.T. Junior”, we got 4 motors working at once with a H bridge and a Raspberry Pi. This simplified system was created to assist with new teams entering the rapidly manufactured rescue challenge (RMRC), which will be fully documented and published when it is ready.Read More

Here’s how we got our Jetson Nano working reliably with an Intel Wireless AC 3165 PCIe WiFi card. This post outlines the steps someone else used to solve this issue on the Nvidia developer forums, but the solution was spread over multiple posts whereas this one puts all those steps in one place.  Depending on...Read More

For years, power has always been something we have constantly been seeking to improve. Most robots and other remote/portable applications utilise LiPo batteries. While flexible and providing lots of power in a small package, LiPo batteries do have a lot of concerning characteristics. In particular, they are quite prone to overheating and catching fire, as...Read More

Moving away from the challenging year that 2020 was for us all, S.A.R.T. was very fortunate to get the opportunity to partner with Dell Technologies to power our efforts moving into 2021. As a part of our partnership, Dell have generously provided us with a number of Dell products to help enhance our robot system....Read More

Authors: Connor Kneebone, Alexander Cavalli, Jack Williams, Matthew Williams, Graham Stock, Charlotte Drury, Anthony Gambale, Michael Cavalli, Nathaniel Kneebone, Martin Hosking, Alexander Thorning Published: 20th of March, 2020 Abstract The Semi-Autonomous Rescue Team (herein known as the S.A.R.T.) is a group of STEM enthusiasts originally formed in early 2015 with the intent of developing and...Read More

The wheels we made for the Mark III robot did pretty well. The new polyurethane tires were excellent, they had plenty of grip, were basically indestructible and they maintained their grip over many hours of use. The hubs worked pretty well… well, most of the time. Apart from the structural issues due to low infill...Read More

A brief history of two-way audio In previous years, we have used a few methods to do two-way audio. Initially we had a speech to text and back again system to transmit data. Needless to say, this was quite limiting and not particularly… well, good. This was replaced in 2018 with Mumble, a basic VoIP...Read More