It’s Friday, June 12, and tomorrow is our second competition of the year – Robogames. We’ll be heading over to the San Francisco shoreline tomorrow morning to check in. Hopefully, we’ll be there really early, because we’ve got to get in and get set up as soon as the venue opens.
This weekend, we’ll be competing in the Best of Show category for the Junior League, against three other teams and their robots. The Best in Show is Robogames’ judged competition, in which all contestants are judged based on originality, functionality, and aesthetics.
One of the robots we’ll be competing against is CGLF’s Cerebraen, a luggage-carrying Vex robot from north of the Bay that competed in Robofest. Our competition also includes a team from our friends at American High, who are entering their Robomagellan device, Myrmecophaga tridactyla, in the Best of Show category. According to the event registration page, there’s also one more robot: MVMS’s MDJ mysterious Vex Pinger.
We’re preparing Skittles as a light, man-portable reconnaissance airship. It’ll be equipped with a tilting bracket and our 2.4GHz wireless camera from Tech Challenge, to look around, in addition to the usual dual-controller setup. We’re also going to add an array of white and infrared LEDs, to be used in the dark, that will be controlled using a PWM channel.
Eric working with the frame
Raymond working with blimp electronics>
In the materials we’ve prepared to show the judges, we also talk about a few possible add-ons. We considered the possibility of including speakers and using Skittles as a device for negotiation. We also looked at including a microcontroller (the Java SunSpot looks like a good candidate, being PWM-capable and features accelerometers and gyroscopes), which would open up a whole new world of possibilities to us.
Rex working on the Robogames presentation
Catherine’s gone to the East Coast, but the rest of the team will be present sometime on Saturday. David’s actually going to be busy in the morning, but he’ll be coming over to cover for us after Raymond and Rebecca head back to Fremont to cover the FIRST Robotics orientation later in the day. Eric, naturally, will be spending the whole day in San Francisco and hopefully getting some great information on sumo, combat, and autonomously guided robots for next year.
In any case, the team will be finishing up work today and preparing all our competition paraphernalia, so wish us luck!
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