Fayetteville State University News December 14, 2015 Fayetteville State University Selected to Compete in NASA Competition Fayetteville State University (FSU) has been chosen to compete in the first NASA Swarmathon Physical Competition. The competition, which is designed to enhance STEM education in universities and also help NASA develop the next generation of robots, will be held for the next three years with possible continuation. Each year the competing teams will develop advanced algorithms for the control of swarm robots and submit these algorithms to NASA for testing and ranking. This last phase will be held each year in the Kennedy Space Center where teams will converge for a week in April. "Schools were selected in a highly competitive application process," said Melanie Moses, Principal Investigator for the NASA Swarmathon Challenge and Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico. "Teams were selected based on technical qualifications and teaching experience of the faculty mentor and proposed plans to engage students and succeed in the Swarmathon Challenge. We received an impressive set of applications and were only able to award physical robots to the very best teams." The FSU team, which was competitively selected based on a proposal, will be given Swarmie robots by January 2016. Swarmies are small robotic vehicles equipped with sensors, a webcam, GPS system, and Wi-Fi antenna. They operate autonomously and can be programmed to communicate and interact as a collective swarm. Robotic swarms are more robust, flexible and scalable than large single robots which operate alone. NASA is interested in this technology since it can be more effective in searching for resources on extraplanetary surfaces like Moon, Mars, and asteroids where materials such as ice, rocks, minerals and construction materials will be needed in the future to build human shelters. Swarm robotics technology is still in its infancy, and it is an active topic of research which includes development of algorithms, computational techniques for search, learning and data aggregation. Dr. Sambit Bhattacharya of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science is the key personnel from FSU in the NASA Swarmathon Physical Competition. He is creating the Swarmathon student team from students enrolled in his Artificial Intelligence class. The competition will enhance opportunities for hands-on learning for FSU students. "Students will learn software engineering, algorithm design and testing, mathematics (for example, methods for combining data from multiple noisy sensors to improve robot localization)," Moses said. "We also encourage students to read articles in published literature to find search algorithms that they can build on. This is an example of problem based learning in which students develop the STEM skills they need to solve a problem, and they will see how well their solution works in real robots. A constituent institution of the University of North Carolina, Fayetteville State University is the second-oldest public institution in North Carolina. With more than 6,100 students, it offers more than 60 undergraduate and graduate degree programs. For more information, call (910) 672-1474. SANDRA M. PHOENIX Executive Director HBCU Library Alliance sphoenix@hbculibraries.org<mailto:sphoenix@hbculibraries.org> www.hbculibraries.org<http://www.hbculibraries.org/> 800-999-8558, ext. 4820 404-702-5854 Skype: sandra.phoenix1 Like us on facebook at https://www.facebook.com/hbculibraryalliance/ 1438 West Peachtree NW Suite 200 Atlanta,GA 30309 Toll Free: 1.800.999.8558 (LYRASIS) Fax: 404.892.7879 www.lyrasis.org<http://www.lyrasis.org/> Honor the ancestors, honor the children.