What is UTAIR?
UTAIR was originally the name for the University of Toronto Artificial Intelligence Robotics club. Eventually the club either rebranded or was dissolved and UTRA was then created. Now UTAIR is the name for the University of Toronto Aerospace and Robotics Club.
From 2001 to 2002, I took on a thesis for my undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering in the mechatronics space. The project at hand was Robocup in which us engineering students had to build robots that could play soccer but do this on their own. It was a full on AI project.
To start the project, I formed a team with 2 other engineering students in the mechatronics class. I sent a note out to a message board seeing if any other students wanted to get involved and we got a lot of computer science and computer engineering students volunteering.
By April 2002, we did get 2 robots working and playing soccer on their own. One robot attacking an orange golf ball while the other robot was playing goal and defending. We had a camera looking down on the field with the equivalent of QR codes on top of the robots to understand which robot was which, and understand their orientation.
We didn't qualify for the Robocup tournament but we had fun working on this very challenging project.
Who knew that I wouldn't touch AI for a full 20 years.