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).
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
Again a very nice lecture We saw different type of robots and found out about a lot of interesting robot competitions. At one point the proffessor asked us two questions and we’re supposed to answer here. So:
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:
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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
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).
So we rechecked the program and did the debugging step by step.
