On the 8th April, IC Robotics Society entered 2 robots into the UK round of Eurobot, a robotics competition held at Middlesex University's Department of Product Design and Engineering. Eurobot is now a world-wide competition (non-european countries such as Taiwan and Canada enter too!) in which young people build robots capable of autonomously solving a certain problem.
The problem changes every year, and this year the theme was Chess. Robots had to find yellow pawns which were distributed randomly around the 2mx3m arena and place them in squares of their own colour, in order to score points. Extra points could be gained by stacking kings and queens on top of the pawns, and bonuses were available for robots who could place pawns on the squares with black circles in their center. It might seem pretty complicated, but these rules provide enough complexity to allow for interesting tactics and strategies.
Here are our robots:
On the left you can see the robot IC-r-us (pronounces Ick-ah-rus), a robot made entirely out of lego. This robot embodied the KISS principle - Keep It Simple Stupid - by having one aim and one aim only: find a pawn, take it back to base, and sit on it! This gave it 50 bonus points, which the team were confident would be enough to succeed in the UK round.
On the right, and facing away from us, is ICRobot which was custom built and had much more ambition. It had 3 stepper motors (2 for the wheels and one for the liftable base-plate), a few sharp IR sensors for detecting the opposition robot and pawns, and an ARM mbed microcontroller. The packet of bluetack you can see was a last minute fix to make the robot more opaque and detectable to the opposition! Here's a video of it in action
ICrobot had torque problems. The steppers just didn't provide enough oomph to reliably navigate the maze without skipping. This means that without any other form of position feedback, it lost where it was pretty quickly.
Middlesex University once again had an impressive array of robots on show. Three of them can be seen below. Laser cutters look like fantastic tools for a building robot chassis!
If you look at the 2 robots closest to the camera, you can see that they are using holonomic drive systems. These allow the robot to move in any direction and rotate independantly! Another great example of this drive system is the Airtrax Forklift Truck.
In the end IC-r-us, being extremely simple, proved exceptionally reliable, and didn't lose a round. It won 1st place in the UK competition, meaning that the team gets to go to Russia for the World finals in June. Good luck guys!
ICRobot came in at 8th place, which is certainly respectable when you take into account it's unlucky disqualification due to dropping a battery. The team plans to compete again next year, so they'll have a lot more experience, and I'm quite sure they'll perform well!
All in all, 11 of our robotics club members managed to make it to the competition this year, which was pretty good considering a large proportion of our students had flown back home for the Easter holidays! We're looking forward to seeing IC-r-us perform in Russia (rumour says that it will have a camera on-board by that time, for more ambitious point scoring!) and I'll keep you updated on their progress!
One last thing... We really want to see more teams from more UK universities enter this competition. If you are interested, please please send us a message and we'd love to help you on your way to entering next year. We have a few sources of sponsorship that would love to know you're keen and pay for you to make a robot!