Annual Talent Contest December 2007
Each year we hold a contest which is open to anyone to show their favorite project. The winners are chosen by the audience considering factors such as: Software, Electronics, Hardware and overall appeal. You can find the rules here.
The first Entrant was Jim Ubersetzig with his robot, “CR” (short for Can Retriever) which is being built for next months contest. The robot was demonstrated to successfully locate a can and pick it up. His robot is the one in the foreground holding a red can.
Brian O’Neal showed a Tamiya tank setup with a body made of ABS as he demonstrated in the classroom session earlier in the day. It has a camera mounted with Pan and tilt mechanism with radio control from a standard RC controller. This tank design was made for a number of students who had a project.
Martin Mason demonstrated his new RoboQuad which he has interfaced to Steven Gentner’s RoboRealm.com vision software. He has built a hardware and software interface which converts laptop commands to the proprietary IR protocol that the robot uses. He demonstrated voice commands to a laptop which he then sent out on USB which was converted to RS-232 serial which was then finally converted to the proprietary IR signals. He also showed that he had a camera installed which communicated with RoboRealm in the laptop.
Brian O’Neal showed a second entry which is his “Bulldog” sumo robot. He gave a description of how he is using two ultrasonic rangefinders mounted in a stereo configuration to more accurately locate the competitor robot by using triangulation.
Martin Mason showed a second robot also which is a tractor design which has been mounted with a camera which communicates with a laptop over a radio link . He uses RoboRealm vision software to make the robot follow a trail of red dots as shown in the picture.
The winners of the contest were:
1st Jim Ubersetzig
2nd Brian O’Neal
3rd Martin Mason
