Super Line following June 2009

by Jef Mangelschots

June 2009 - a day to remember for RSSC. The super-dooper line following contest is here. As usual we announce some rules, which we end up breaking each and every time, and ... we don't care. We make it up as we go along. This time we wanted to test the endurance level of our bots. Not for wimps - at least not wimpy budget batteries. 

da battleground

This time we brought plenty of black electrical tape. The hallway was completely covered.

da bots

This year we had a good turnout. Here are the competitor (well, their bots that is)

On the left, you'll recognize Alex's Leaf robot called Rocky. Alex always wants to do things the hard way, so this time he concocted the following scheme for himself: instead of using standard line sensors, he set out for his robot to follow the line using vision with Roborealm and a USB camera. Oh boy, did he regret that one. As it turns out, we are using standard black electrical tape. That is somewhat shiny. It is practically impossible to not get reflections in there. In the eyes of a robot using vision processing techniques like canny-edge detection, the reflection result in omissions in the line. Here is a video taken from Rocky's camera. 

da game

The only real robot is the one you finish during the competition. This competitor brought his own robotics professor, .. oh no, that's Martin, the club prez. Actually he's both. In all fairness to the contestant, Martin called him up the night before with the ultimatum: "show up with a working robot or I'll flunk ya !". Thank you Martin.

Martin also provided a laser-activated timer in the front. 

da results

OK, before you read the results, first some explanation. Please bear with me. Martin brought his daughter Katie, and I brought my daughter Anouk. They both hit it off really well. When asked for the name of  her robot, Katie gave it Anouk's name, so guess what name Anouk gave our robot.

da winners

da vids