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:

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!

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!

• 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.

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!

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.

What’s it all about: The Pushbox Obstacle – the robot must push away the cardboard box and go through the 2 sidegates. Like in this picture:

Now we’re (almost) sure that by tomorrow at 18 we’ll have all the 5 tasks completed

This is how BALL-E acts on the third task:

We’re working on this one today. Wish us tons of goodluck

UPDATE at 16:30:

The three boys from the team are thinking hard and trying to make it work. See?

Aaaand… it works! Like in this video:

1.) What robot would you create?

We watched some videos about robots on YouTube and we found out BigDog which is the most impressive robot we’ve ever seen.

BigDog is the alpha male of the Boston Dynamics family of robots. It is a quadruped robot that walks, runs, and climbs on rough terrain and carries heavy loads. BigDog is powered by a gasoline engine that drives a hydraulic actuation system. BigDog’s legs are articulated like an animal’s, and have compliant elements that absorb shock and recycle energy from one step to the next. BigDog is the size of a large dog or small mule, measuring 1 meter long, 0.7 meters tall and 75 kg weight.

BigDog has an on-board computer that controls locomotion, servos the legs and handles a wide variety of sensors. BigDog’s control system manages the dynamics of its behavior to keep it balanced, steer, navigate, and regulate energetics as conditions vary. Sensors for locomotion include joint position, joint force, ground contact, ground load, a laser gyroscope, and a stereo vision system. Other sensors focus on the internal state of BigDog, monitoring the hydraulic pressure, oil temperature, engine temperature, rpm, battery charge and others.

We think that this type of robot is very useful in military purposes. It can help a lot in reducing the number of deaths in wars and not only. So we would like to develop a similar robot.

2.) If you had the necessary money, what robot would you buy?

After playing for a while with Aibo, we all agreed that he would be the perfect pet, so we want to take him home (buy him)

Find and measure distance to box - this is our first task:

As this was the first complex-task we had to do with BALL-E, it took longer than expected to do it right. After the planning and the programming part, the robot was just moving back and forward and back and forward and back… you got the idea So we rechecked the program and did the debugging step by step.

After something like 15 tries, BALL-E managed to follow correctly the line. Something like this:

Now we’re working on the ‘measure the distance’ part and it’s all done. We predict that we’ll finish this today and hope that the other 4 tasks will go smoothly