The Revival

Buggy has been the official sport of Carnegie Mellon University ever since Carnegie Tech was founded in the early 1900's. Robotics has been CMU's claim to fame ever since the first Robotics Institute was established in 1979.

At the dawn of the 21st century, the School of Computer Science put two and two together, and thus RoboBuggy was born. The idea had been around for over 10 years, but it wasn't until Arne Suppe's undergraduate thesis when it was actually implemented.

The result:

In the spring of 2010, two young enterprising freshman won the Mobot race, becoming the first undergraduates to ever fully complete the course. Nathaniel Barshay was the project lead and Alex Klarfeld was assistant to the project lead providing necessary support including: providing a netbook, making sure the mobot didn't run off the course, and monitoring the sunlight that entered Nate's eyes.

Alex and Nate with the winning mobot and Greg Armstrong

Their win sparked a drive to go onto bigger and better things.

Shortly after the competition, Alex mentioned the idea of RoboBuggy to Nate after seeing the project in Professor Kosbie's office. He was immediately intrigued. After a meeting with Arne Suppe, the previous project lead, it was settled that RoboBuggy would be revived.

A rag tag team of short Jewish men was immediately assembled when news of a RoboBuggy project spread to Alex and Nate's fraternity, Alpha Epsilon Pi (AEPi). Alex Klarfeld took on the role of Chief Logistics Officer and Nate assumed the title of Chief Technical Officer. Meetings were scheduled, workshops were cleaned, and free time was deemed obsolete as the preparation for RoboBuggy began. 

This blog will document the RoboBuggy project and its associated endeavors.

Tonight, Alex Klarfeld and Maxwell Hutchinson (AEPi's president) will be meeting with the new Sweepstakes Chair in order to discuss incorporating RoboBuggy into AEPi's regular fleet of buggies.

RoboBuggy itself should arrive in the AEPi workshop later this week as soon as we get the "go ahead" from the CS department.

Stay tuned.