One Hack to Make Them All… One Bot to Rule Them!

They moved, they shimmied, they even kept in tune with some Sri Lankan papare music, and  we are not talking about the students of Indiana University’s School of Informatics and Computing, although they showed us some off-the-charts talent themselves. It was all about the bot stuff at the WSO2 Hackathon 2015! Partnering with Indiana University’s School of Informatics and Computing (SoIC) and the Computer Science Club (CSC), the WSO2 Hackathon set the stage exclusively for SoIC students to unleash their brilliance in robotics technology. Held April 18 at Indiana University Bloomington, all 20 participants (6 teams and 2 individuals) successfully completed the challenge of building an autonomous robot in eight hours, connecting it to the WSO2 middleware platform. Team Double Stuffed Corey-O's emerged winners of the hackathon based on overall performance. Team members Jessica Pusateri, Corey Denault and Dakota Langdon walked away with a Bose QuietComfort® 25 Acoustic Noise Cancelling® headphone each. #WSO2Hackathon was trending on Twitter throughout the day, with Tyler Citrin from team Squad being awarded a Beats Pill Speaker & Holder for his entertaining tweets. Xiaoyue Hong from team Soysan won a Huawei TalkBand B2 for the best selfie during the hackathon. Apart from these prizes, two deserving roboticists from SoIC who showed exceptional talent during the hackathon, Di Zhong and Corey Denault, were awarded fully sponsored one month long summer internships at the WSO2 Office in Sri Lanka, inclusive of a week-long tour across the island. This eight hour hackathon was the second in a series of WSO2 Hackathons, focusing on specific areas of expertise in the industry. The objective for this hackathon was for the robots to capture motion and environmental changes via sensors, and perform specific tasks in their given environment. This challenge thereby focused heavily on the Internet of Things (IoT), and how more connected devices and applications are in today’s rapidly advancing connected world. The talent unearthed at Indiana University was nothing short of exceptional. “The hackathon went beyond our expectations. It was a success not only in terms of fostering greater use of open source technologies and IoT architecture, but also in terms of encouraging innovation among this new community of coders”, said Director of API Architecture at WSO2, Sumedha Rubasinghe. “We are definitely looking at hosting similar events in the future.” The winning team, Double Stuffed Corey-O's, said, “It was a lot of fun, first of all, we had a great time. We’ve never had this kind of experience with robotics. It was cool to see your code actually do something physical in the real world!” Team member Jessica Pusateri also added about the WSO2 Hackathon “I can’t even imagine how much planning went into (organizing) this, because it all went really smoothly. It was really really fun!” Visit https://wso2hackathon.com/ for more information about WSO2 Hackathons