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The Centre of Technology for Automation and Robotics (CoTAR)
 


The CoTAR is a technology development centre in ITE College West focusing on innovative application development and mobile robotics. The mission of this Centre is to provide resources, opportunities and activities to staff and students to:-

 - develop a spirit of innovation, risk taking and enterprise in the students.

- cultivate application development in the fields of the embedded systems, sensor fusion, automation and other relevant disciplines

- collaborate with other technology centres in the education community and industry partners on robotics and application development

- create an awareness of and promote engineering and robotics to staff and students through knowledge sharing and competitions


 
 


What We Do
The Centre identifies and actively encourages our students to participate in competitions, both locally and overseas. Over the years, the students have made remarkable achievements in these competitions. These competitions include the Tan Kah Kee Young Inventor’s Award, Green Wave Environmental Care Competition, Singapore Robotics Games (SRG), IEEE - APEC Micromouse Competition, All Japan Micromouse Competition and the Korean Intelligent Robot Contest.

The Centre facilitate students and staff across the college in industrial collaboration and project development which embodies multiple disciplines and technologies such as embedded systems, sensor fusion, automation and programming.

Project Information
The Centre actively seeks competition platforms and collaboration with its industry partners and has been engaged in numerous projects over the years. Highlights of some of them:

 
  Robotic Goalkeeper

This is an interactive game where participants will challenge the robotic goalkeeper in a penalty shootout. The system is run by the Labview program and supported by vision camera, PC and motion controller to compute the speed and direction of the moving ball and direct the robot to block it.

This robot won in the Open Category event in the Singapore Robotic Games 2005. It went on to win the Silver Award in the Intelligent Robot Contest 2005 held in Korea in 2005

Micromouse
The DC micromouse was developed in-house with teams working on embedded design, mechanical design and algorithm control. This mouse was the Champion in the IEEE-APEC Micromouse Competition held in Texas, USA in 2008.

Air-Con Duct Cleaning Robot

Developed in conjunction with industry partner as a proof of concept project, this robot is able to navigate and perform brush cleaning operation of air-condition ducting. The brush module can be substituted with a IP camera module to take video clips and snap shots of the duct conditions.

Intelligent Water Control Unit

 The Water control unit was developed for a food processing company to help maintain consistency in their sauce preparation operation. The unit incorporated a feature to self-calibrate and compensate for transducer error.

Data Acquisition Enterprise Software

This is an application software developed for a concrete testing laboratory. The works involved acquiring test data from the press machine and generating test result and billing documents.

Touch Panel

 Developed in conjunction with a industial partner, this touch panel uses the Cypress, a Programmable System-on-Chip controller. This panel is suitable for front panel applications on many consumer electronics products, such as DVD players, micromove ovens, etc


 Last updated on November 2008