ROBOTMAK3RS Blog

Farnell , a british supplier of electronic hardware, informed us about a challenge they are hosting in collaboration with Panasonic and LEGO®: "In collaboration with Panasonic and LEGO, Farnell element14 are giving away a LEGO® MINDSTORMS® EV3. The EV3 is empowered by a Panasonic PAN1325 Classic Bluetooth® Module and we are looking for innovative ideas of how you use the very same Bluetooth Module.  To enter the competition, entrants are asked to share their projects online: a tweet, a blog post, a video on youtube, anything would do. The ideas that have come in so far include anything from automated coffee machines to servo-driven camera shutters.  Details about the competition can be found on uk.farnell.com/panasonic .  The competition is open until 5 January and we also give away 10 vouchers worth £50 each to spend on Farnell.com." So, what would you do with Bluetooth on EV3?

Prof. Dr. Chris Rogers at  Tufts University who has been one of the main contributors to ROBOLAB and the  LABView  edition for LEGO® MINDSTORMS, has created a series of challenges for teams all over the world to take part online: Dr. E's Challenges . The six challenges will be published by and by (likely each two weeks) and have to be solved by teams of two or three students using LEGO® MINDSTORMS NXT. The solutions for a challenge that have been sent in until the associated deadline (by video, text etc) are rated by all participating teams; the team who submitted the one that gets the highest over-all rating will receive a small price. Teams from all over the world  are invited to take part, so go for it! As the competition is running for some days already, the deadline for submissions for the first challenge " Silly walks " is somewhat tight now at 15th of February.

This robot was designed, manufactured and programmed for a design competition (as part of the curriculum) held amongst first year Mechanical Engineering students at Delft university of Technology. The goal was to create a robot that could deliver a tray of drinks as quickly as possible, while also keeping as much as possible of the delivery on board. Our design didn't win an award for fast delivery or keeping most water on board, but we did win the Delft Science Centre award because our design has the most potential for actual usage. Out of 50 teams competing, we built the only robot that could steer and navigate its route. 50 teams with 8 members each took part in the competition, resulting in a wide variety of designs. There weren't many strict guidelines, except for some dimension limits. One major constraint was that forward motion could only be done with a supplied cordless power drill. Designing and manufacturing was done in approximately five months. All of the component...

Brickworld 2010 is rapidly approaching. If you've been, you know it's an incredible experience, getting together AFoL's from all over to share their amazing creations. If you haven't been... it's well worth the trip. With just 30 days to go preparations are in full swing, & I thought I'd mention a few aspects that might appeal to the Mindstorms crowd. There will be displays with the NXT there, and also some head-to-head competitions. There will be Robot Basketball (collisions on the field? So much the better), Robot Jousting (risk of NXT's hitting the floor? Always exciting), and even NXT sinking into the pool (a LEGO pool challenge ... although not explicitly robotic, it certainly could be in the future). There will also be FLL style events, and lot of other fun things going on, including people to meet and talk to, and plenty of ideas running around... not to mention give-aways, prizes, etc. for full admission (and for those who can't be there t...

I'm waiting on some videos to post more about the FTC World Championships and our robot, but in the meantime you can see a video our team put together of our experience at the competition here . I also thought I'd post a description of this year's game so that readers can understand what's going on in the videos. You can click here to see an animation from FIRST that explains how the game works. At a tournament, teams first participate in several qualifying matches . During each qualifying match, two randomly selected teams ally with each other against two other randomly selected teams. The two winning teams gain 2 q ualifying points , while the two losing teams don't gain any. After the qualifying rounds, the team with the most qualifying points is ranked #1, and so on. But what happens if multiple teams have the same number of qualifying points? In this case, a somewhat-confusing tiebreaker is used. After each qualifying match, the four participating teams recie...

Power Surge competed at the FTC NJ State Championship tournament on Saturday... another really fun event! 37 teams competed in the tournament. We won all our matches again, and recieved the Winning Alliance award with our alliance partners 121 Rhode Rage and 248 "P J FTC #2." We also recieved the Innovate award. The Inspire award was given to team "Techno Chix". Congratulations to all the winners! -Jonathan

EDIT: You can see videos of our robot that Ken Johnson posted on the FTC blog, here . Like I posted about earlier , the FTC Delaware Regional Tournament was held on Saturday. What an exciting event! It was held in conjunction with both the FLL and JFLL Delaware State Championship, so it was a pretty major event with lots of teams and spectators. Speaking of FLL, I was realizing at the tournament that I've now seen FLL from three totally different perspectives: as a team competing in it, as a referee, and now as an outsider looking in. It was interesting to see how vastly different these perspectives are, and it's also something that's good to keep in mind when one is refereeing or competing. 2945 Power Surge had a lot of fun competing and watching other teams compete. Our robot performed way beyond our expectations; we won all 11 of our matches, and recieved the Winning Alliance Award (equivalent to FLL's 1st Place Robot Performance) with our alliance partners 3165 Twi...

Team #2945 Power Surge, my FTC team, has been in high gear for the past several weeks preparing for our first regional (state) tournament, which is going to be held in Delaware tomorrow, 1/31. We've had a good amount of time to vastly improve our robot since our first scrimmage, and we're looking forward to an exciting competition. I'll be sure to post all about the tournament after it's over. -Jonathan P.S. You can learn more about the team and see pictures and a video at our website, http://www.teampowersurge.org/

Since Built On The Rock decided not to compete in FLL this year, I was asked to be a head ref at the NJ State Tournament, which was held on Saturday. This was my first time reffing, and it was neat seeing all the different solutions that teams came up with for the missions. Here's a few thoughts about the tournament and season: 1. This year's challenge definitely seems harder than those in recent past years. The highest score at the tournament was a 300 by the Robo Invaders, as opposed to last year's 400 followed by a 395. Also, I haven't heard of any perfect scores being made anywhere else yet... has anyone heard of one? The difficulty of this year's challenge doesn't seem to be caused so much by hard individual missions - many are simple push-objects-to-the-right-zone missions - but more by the sheer number of missions. There are 18 missions this year: twice as many as the number of missions in Nano Quest, and 7 more than in Power Puzzle. Many of them aren...

NXTLog put up a new building challenge... this time contestants have to build a robot for a holiday. Read about it here . -Jonathan

Remember the post on the MINDSTORMS competition by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group where you should build an interesting NXT robot that uses Bluetooth to communicate with some other Bluetooth-enabled device in some way? They have extended their deadline for submissions until end of October now and dropped the limitation to contributors aged 21 and over - a wise decision in my eyes. Thanks to our reader Dirk for the information.

This year, Built On The Rock is taking a break from FLL. However, a couple of the team members and I are forming a new FTC team with some members of Team Overdrive, the World Festival robot champions from last year's FTC competition. (The other members decided to move up to FRC this year). The new robot system used in FTC, which combines the NXT with stronger, more powerful, non-LEGO construction pieces and motors, looks really nice. It makes sense too; the NXT has great processing and sensory power, but the LEGO construction system and NXT motors just aren't made for big, strong robots. Once we get our kit and the season gets underway, I'm hoping to post a lot more information about the system; it seems like it could be really useful for many applications other than FTC. Any other NXT people out there looking at or getting into FTC? -Jonathan

The Pellet Dispensing Competition ended yesterday; what a great competition! It was a lot of fun designing a robot to work in a real factory with non-LEGO elements. You can see a couple videos of my robot below: An overview of the robot: A short test run of the robot dispensing 241 pellets. Notice that, if you divide the video's time (159.65 seconds) by the number of pellets dispensed, you find that the average time per drop is .662 seconds; only 4 thousandths of a second off! -Jonathan

Registrations are now open for RoboCup Junior Australia events. To register, please visit: http://www.robocupjunior.org.au/ and follow the links. The offficial national rules are also on that site, but I have worked with local organsiers to produce a set of summarised 'guides' that include some clarifications and modifications to suit the RoboCup Junior Tasmania competition. The RCJT Guides are available as PDFs from the Robotics Tasmania web site: RCJT Guide to Dance 2008 (100 KB, last updated 16/6/08) RCJT Guide to Rescue & Premier Rescue 2008 (170 KB, last updated 16/6/08) RCJT Guide to Soccer (135KB, last updated 29/6/08)

Has anyone visited RoboChamps already, Microsoft 's new (?) web site for robot competitions (and for promoting its Robotics Studio in the end). Looks quite professional and entertaining. Note: the site requires Silverlight , Microsoft's competitor to Flash. As for me, my Firefox browser regularly crashes after a while since I've installed Silverlight. Hrmpfh!

On Saturday 19 April, a group of high intelligent people were gathering for a special weekend to do all sorts of activities. I’ve been asked to do a special workshop on LEGO MINDSTROMS. 14 kids in age 8 to 16 were challenged to build a robot that could collect 9 bars standing in the middle of an arena. Mindstorms was new to all the kids. Initially I explained how to build a small base robot (the 30 min retail box model) and how to do the base actions in NXT-G. 7 teams were building and programming robots for almost 5 hours. The goal was to collect the pillars, of one color and bring them back to their base(corner). Points were given: -1 point for pushing/ tipping the pillar over. -3 points for bringing the pillar back to the base. -30 points bonus, for bringing only one (of the three) colors back. -12 points bonus for not toughing the walls of the arena. - extra bonus points could be earned for added value (like sounds). The best team was the Blue Bot Team with 15 points. Considered th...

Proof that the race doesn't always go to the swift. (And that the word, "bingo" has the same meaning in German and English). :)

The Chicago-area robotics club, ChiBots, held a competition this weekend called Chibotica. The competition was open to all types of robots, and there were several NXTs entered. The photo is of an NXT-powered line follower called Big Rig - created by Steve Hassenplug. You can view photos here . You can view videos here .

If you live near San Francisco and may be looking for something robotic to do that weekend...head on over and take a look at the world's largest open robot competition. The 4th annual RoboGames is sure to "spark" some interest for builders and spectators alike. There will be many different classes of robots from LEGO MindStorms to fire-spitting behemoths...and featuring competitions in over 70 different events: combat robots, walking humanoids, soccer bots (Robot World Cup), sumo bots, and even androids that do kung-fu. Some robots are autonomous and some are remote controlled. LEGO Challenge (Line Running Challenge) LEGO Open (Robot Design Contest) If you go send me some pictures! I'll post them here. Chris

NXTLog just released the next NXTLog building challenge. This time the challenge is to design and build a quadruped: a robot that walks on four feet. Once again, there's no limits to the sensors, motors, etc. that you can use, and judging is based on how innovative the design of the robot is, how well it works, and how well the robot is documented on NXTLog. You can read the announcement here . -Jonathan