de Leeuw with three of his robot cars

POUGHKEEPSIE - Kia Motors and Microsoft have just announced that Joshua de Leeuw of Vassar’s Interdisciplinary Robotics Research Laboratory was awarded second prize in the worldwide programming competition: RoboChamps KIA Motors Urban Challenge. 

“I tried to find the simplest solution to a complex problem,” said de Leeuw about his winning idea. Known as 'The Deliverator,' de Leeuw received a $10,000 cash prize for his success at programming a simulated robot car, which could drive autonomously in a 3-D virtual city.

A 2008 graduate of Vassar with a bachelor’s degree in Cognitive Science, de Leeuw works in Vassar’s Interdisciplinary Robotics Research Laboratory as a faculty research associate, focusing on projects that include developing a robot modeled after a fish.

“Basically, we take an ‘infant’ robot, and we give it nothing but a way to learn” said De Leeuw.  “We want the robot to figure out how to move around on its own without bumping into things. So we let it loose to explore, and we watch it learn.”

At Vassar, De Leeuw competed in robot competitions during his sophomore and junior years and participated in three Undergraduate Research Summer Institutes on robotics. Vassar was the world’s first institution to offer an undergraduate degree in Cognitive Science, which the college created in 1982.

The RoboChamps competition, launched by Microsoft on April 25, 2008, was a global tournament in which participants wrote robot programs using Microsoft’s free Robotics Developer Studio software. De Leeuw’s second prize was awarded in the KIA Motors Urban Challenge component that began on October 9 and ended on November 30, 2008. The prizes KIA provided were a car worth $15,000 (or cash equivalent) as first prize; $10,000 as second prize; and $5,000 as third prize. (www.robochamps.com/forums/p/326/1346.aspx#1346)