The offspring and I spent part of the last weekend at the Seattle Robotics Society’s Robothon 2009. My main involvement in robotics has been having a few friends who were quite adept, and doing a tiny bit of mindstorm programming.
On Saturday, we spent a fair amount of time at the Robo-Magellan competition, which is competition to build vehicle that can autonomously navigate from one orange cone to another. Most of the robots use GPS (WAAS okay, differential not okay), some sort of vision system, contact sensors, and a vision system to identify the cone. A pretty hard problem – out of 6 robots and 3 tries each, there was one successful run.
Watching the competition is a little like golf – lots of people following the robot to see how it’s doing, and clapping when something good happens. At one point, one of the robots came across this scene:
Notice the two kids at the left and right. What do they look like?
That’s right, they look like cones, and the robot attempted to move towards them (at speeds up to 1MPH or so) for a time, and there had to be some readjustment.
The whole idea of building one of these sounds like a very interesting project – integrating software and hardware towards solving a hard problem. I’m somewhat tempted trying to build one…
After the autonomous competition was over, we went back into the center house and watched some robot sumo:
These are really tiny bots – they can’t be more than 10cm on a side, and can’t weigh more than 500 grams (0.00055 tons). The cool thing is that all the robots are autonomous – they all have onboard intelligence (presumably microcontrollers) and sensors. Lots of fun to watch.
Sunday
Sunday we came back to watch some radio-controlled combat vehicles, hosted by Washington Allied Robotics. As much as I like seeing two radio-controlled vehicles try to destroy each other, after a while it pales a bit – looking at their construction, there is chassis, motor, battery, and the radio and drive electronics. An interesting engineering challenge, but not really any code there. But, some have impressive weapons.
I think what we’re seeing here is the titanium spinner of the left bot hitting the titanium front plate of the right one. This is shot through plexiglass, so the quality isn’t great, but I do really like the branching in the left side of the sparks.
Some of the robots can fly:
At least for short periods.
Those are the highlights, but there are a lot of matches that are considerably less exciting. Overall, it’s a lot like watching hydroplane racing – 3 minutes of excitement followed by 30 minutes of waiting.
So, what do you think ?