On May 23rd, 2009 the school held a Tech Fest to give electronics students an opportunity to display and compete with their electronic creations. Here is the basic information on the robots to be presented and the competition events. For contest rules, Click Here.
The robot judged to have the best electronics workmanship and originality was a robot arm. The winner hacked the Wii game controllers by reading the accelorometers and converting those readings into signals thet control a robot arm. Watch in the video as it picks up a pair of pliers, moves around and then sets the pliers down.
This next robot was perhaps the most complex programming project of the winning entries. The robot is "trained" to search for a radio transmitter, find it, pick it up, then take it back home. Although the weight of the transmitter platform gave the hexapod robot a challenge, you can see in this video that it had a number of behaviors mastered.
Here, 3PI and BOE-Bot robots are working through the line maze to fine tune the maze programming.
There were two classes for this event. Since the Board of Education Robot (BOE-Bot) uses servos for propulsion, they cannot be expected to compete with robots with DC motors, so the line following and line maze contests will be subdivided into servo propulsion using the Parallax.com Board of Education (BOE) Robot and motor propulsion using the Pololu.com 3PI robot.
Here are some shots of the BOE-Bot Line Following Contest entrants:
This robot finished well ahead of the other competitors:
Angel had some difficulties in his first runs, but completed the course in a respectable time.
And here is Chris and his BOE-Bot.
And here are some other photos:
A BOE-Bot and a 3PI robot making test runs on the maze course.
The 3PI robots showed speed and agility on both courses. Unfortunately, the instructor's video camera failed and could not download the videos. If any student has videos of these events, please let me know.
Here are Angel, Schafer and severasl other students watching 3PI test runs:
