At the end of the course…

We want to thank the organizers from BEST Copenhagen, the professors from DTU and LEGO for giving us the opportunity to be part in this event

As promised, we will reveal the results of the competition:

1st PLACE: Team no. 4 (20 points)

2nd PLACE: Team no. 2 and Team no. 5 (18 points)

3rd PLACE: Team no. 3 (15 points)

4th PLACE: Team no. 1 (13 points)

5th PLACE: Team no. 6 (11 points)

As you can see from the final results, BALL-E wasn’t as good as we expected. Unfortunately, tasks no. 2 and 3 didn’t work at all in the competition even if at every test before they worked perfectly well At task 1 we got the maximum number of points, at task 5 we did ok (like every other team) and task 4 wasn’t that good (at least we expected this).

Here is the article in ingeniøren.com about the summer course, focused on the competition: http://ing.dk/artikel/90292?nyhedsbrev and here you can see us on TV: http://www.tv2lorry.dk/moduler/nyheder/showregvideo.asp?dato=15-08-2008&cID=1&vId=439177.

The good news is that we had another competition close to the LEGO factory in Billund and our team was the BEST! We had 2 tasks to complete in more-or-less 3 hours and our robot did very well on both (obs: we had to build another robot, not obligatory a TriBot). Pictures from that competition and with our team holding the LEGO cup soon

Btw, did we say that LEGOLAND is totally awesome?

UPDATE: Team 1 holding the LEGO cup:

Competition Day

This morning we got the chance to present our magnificent presentation

It’s this one here: The Presentation

Now we’re fixing some things so that BALL-E performs better on the tasks this afternoon. We were told that a newspaper and a Danish tv channel are going to come and see us at the competition – this makes us even more nervous

The next few days we’re going to Copenhagen and Legoland (yey!), so we won’t post here anymore, but we’ll try to write a post at the end of next week with the result of the competition and how BALL-E react on the 5 tasks.

Whish us tons of luck, dear readers!

The day before the competition

Now that all the 5 tasks are (almost) finished and we have the presentation for tomorrow morning, all we have to do now is hope that we will do well on the competition.

Just one problem appeared, but it can do lots of damage: when we changed to batteries to the new&charged ones, we realized that the robot is not working like it is supposed to anymore

We’ll live and see how it all goes tomorrow!

Competition assignment no. 5

The Odometry Test: the robot must start at ’Start’ and go one time around the wooden cylinders and back to the starting point.

• The error is the distance between the starting and ending point.

• Two runs must be done, one clockwise and the other counter clockwise.

• The resulting error is the sum of the two errors.


We’re working on this one in parallel with the 4th one and hope they both will work by the end of the day.

UPDATE at 18:20 – The 5th one does work, but Vesna & Aurelien & Pedro are still trying to get the 4th one to work well. We haven’t had enough time to film it and upload the video. Maybe we’ll do it tomorrow at the competition.

Competition Assignment no. 4

The Golf Course: the robot must stat at ‘Start’ and push the blue balls past the upper line and the orange balls past the lower line. We get one point for each ball that passes the right line and -1 point for each ball taht passes the wrong line.

Aurelien and Sebastian already started working on this one and we’ll join then after lunch. It’s the first one where we have to change the original look of BALL-E. At first sight it doesn’t seem to be a hard one, but who knows?

More to come later!

Day 4 Lecture

This morning we had another nice lecture, held by Luis Sanchez from Spain, who is a DTU visiting researcher. On Monday he introduced us to the environment in which we program the LEGO robot (NXT-G) and now he spoke about Vision in Robotics. Maybe we’ll upload to lecture on the blog later.

If you’re interested in this particular subject, search for these books (the proffessor recommended to us):

1.) Roland Siegwart & Illah R. Nourbakhsh – ‘Introduction to Autonomous Mobile Robots’

2.) Stefan Florczyk – ‘Robot Vision’

As the course finished a hour early, we are now in the lab working on the next competition assignment and trying to finish the first one (which, in our opinion) is the hardest.