We’re in St. Paul Minnesota for the Institute of Navigation’s Autonomous Snowplow Contest. It’s a yearly competition that invites university and college engineering students to use their navigation and control technologies (in order) to create robots with the sole purpose of clearing as much snow as possible from a designated area, without any human intervention. Engineers kit out their vehicles with radio beacons, lasers, optical and ultrasonic sensors so that the robots can autonomously navigate themselves. With thousands of dollars in prize money at stake — plus a whole lot of bragging rights — the robots and their makers, get ready to plow.