The International Aerial Robotics Competition (IARC) began in 1991 on the campus of the Georgia Institute of Technology. Since 199 collegiate teams, with the backing of industry and government have fielded autonomous flying robots in an attempt to perform missions that required robotic behaviors never before exhibited in a flying machine. In 1990, the term “Aerial Robotics” was coined by competition creator Prof. Robert Michelson to describe a new class of small highly intelligent flying machines. The successive years of competition saw these aerial robots grow in their capabilities from vehicles that could at first barely maintain themselves in the air, to the most recent automatons which are self-stable, self-navigating, and able to interact with their environment – especially, objects on the ground.
The primary goal of the competition has been to provide a reason for the state-of-the art in aerial robotics to move forward. Challenges set before the international collegiate community have been geared to produce advances in the state-of-the-art at an evermore aggressive pace. As of 2006 four missions have been proposed. Each of them involved fully autonomous robotic behavior that was undemonstrated at the time and impossible for any robotic system fielded anywhere in the world, even by the most sophisticated military robots belonging to the super powers.
| Title | : | International Aerial Robotics Competition (IARC) |
| Category | : | Robotics Competitions. |
| Tags | : | robotics, robotics competition, Robotics News, robots, us robotics, |
The word robotics was derived from the word robot, which was introduced to the public by Czech writer Karel Čapek in his play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), which premiered in 1921.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word robotics was first used in print by Isaac Asimov, in his science fiction short story "Liar!", published in May 1941 in Astounding Science Fiction. Asimov was unaware that he was coining the term; since the science and technology of electrical devices is electronics, he assumed robotics already referred to the science and technology of robots. In some of Asimov's other works, he states that the first use of the word robotics was in his short story Runaround (Astounding Science Fiction, March 1942). However, the word robotics appears in "Liar!"