In the tale of the tortoise and the hare, slow and steady won the race.
In the competition among robots working their way through a carboard maze last week at the University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Science, speed and precision formed the winning combination.
Some of these are people who never programmed a robot before, so it's quite impressive.
The maze runners were part of associate professor Nicola Bezzo’s annual Autonomous Mobile Robots competition, from his course of the same name.
"It's cool that the class can achieve this level of autonomy in less than a month," said Bezzo, who teaches in both the Department of Systems and Information Engineering and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and is affiliated with UVA's Link Lab. "Some of these are people who never programmed a robot before, so it's quite impressive."