StarDestroyer.Net BBS

And because I'm a complete and utter nerd, I'm captain of the school's Robotics team. Our competition has been for the past 3 days, and now that it's finally over I decided to share a few pictures with you all.


First shot of the field in the arena. Behind the divider are the pits, so there's no one in the stands on that end.


Obligatory chest-thumping crowd shot.


Field before a match.


Fiend during a match.


What happens when robots fall over.


Resetting after a match.


4 of my guys bring our bot over to the field.


Random shot of a few of us working on the bot.


Testing the arm.

Cool, what kind of capabilities do they have?

Also I just had a robot competition (of sorts) in university, mind if I post some pictures of my robot in this thread too?

By all means go ahead.

The website for the competition is http://www.usfirst.org/robotics

It had to be able to pick up the tetra's (the triangle things in the pictures) and place them on larger goals. There was an optional 15 seconds you could program the robot to do stuff in without anyone touching the controls, but aside from that there were 3 robots on a team, and the matches lasted 2 minutes + the 15 seconds in the beginning.

Our robot:

http://img216.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img216& ... 0665hf.jpg

I'm the guy all the way at the end on the right, in the black jacket.

We ended up 12th at the Chesapeake regional- almost made it to the semifinal during the elimination rounds in a very close match (lost, won, lost)- problems w/ low air pressure in the middle of the match, as well as some tactical errors though not a single arm failure (we use variable control pneumatics on the arm).

Where was your regional held, what was your ranking, and are you going to Nationals?

I was there, but there are no pics of me because I ensured that. It was in Trenton, but we didn't do so hot, so we're not going to nationals. We had problems with traction (our tires SUCKED, lol) and we didnt have enough experience with the bot itself.

BlackFlash, is that you in the bottom 2 pictures?

Nope. I was taking the pictures, so the only ones I'm in are in someone else's camera.

NJ regional. We really did horribly, but that's a rant you don't want to hear. I felt like showing off the pictures regardless.

I'll explain what ours does before I post pictures. Basically its a fully autonamous mobile robot which navigates outdoors using GPS, infra red, ultrasonic, tactile sensors and a wi-fi based positioning engine. It has two standard wheel chair motors to provide differential drive and a single large castor at the rear. The chassis is made of aluminium sheets and a modular structural system type stuff. It runs using WinXP on a mini-ITX motherboard with a 600mhz processor and powers itself from a pair of car batteries.

Now the pictures:



This is just the front of the robot, the metal panels with the Ekahau and Thales logos (our sponsors) are bump sensors to detect collisions.



This is a top down view inside the robot with some of the chassis removed, you can see all the batteries and electrical stuff at the back and the computer at the front.



Heres a view of the backside of the robot along with my team leader staring blankly into space and a couple of other team members working in the background. You can see the safety tether (the cable with the gray box) that we use to stop the robot if it goes out of control (which happens alot).



Lastly heres a blurry picture of the robot outside in the middle of the night doing some testing, the person holding the laptop (my girlfriend) is controlling the code on the robot remotely through bluetooth and testing the various sensors. Also you can see I added a bunch of case modding lights to the insides of the robot to make it look cool.

As for the actual competition, the robots had to navigate through a series of GPS waypoints across the campus, whichever did it fastest would win. However GPS drift foiled all of the robots on the day except ours which has a cunningly designed filter to deal with erroneous GPS info. But later in the day another team got a similar filter working and managed to make a timed run which got about 10 feet closer to the end than we had before crashing, but they did get alot fo penalties on the way there for collisions so we may still be in 1st place.

Sweet!!

Wait, it runs Windows?
*gasps and keels over*

The hardware they give us/let us use is rather limited (10MHz PIC18), and there is a parts cost limit, so nothing fancy.
Anyway, more pics: http://forum.hayfieldrobotics.us/viewtopic.php?t=206