by Jef Mangelschots

Here are the rules for the Hallway competition.

The July hallway competition had a nice turnout: 3 candidates were willing to face the challenge, including Alex Brown, Mr. Hallway competition himself (a good way of doing really well in a robot competition is to write the contest rules yourself and make them fit for your bot - works every time). 

Alex brought his Leaf robot Rocky to the contest. I can never get enough of seeing him in action. Thomas and Ron both selected the VEX as their weapon of choice. Poor Thomas hurt his back and was in serious pain. But that did not stop him at all. He looked the tiger straight into the eye. No pain - no gain! I personally think that he must have seen one too many Rocky movies in his good old days. At least he scored good in the "more-hair-than-brains" category. OK, that's it for eighties jokes.

This year's competition again showed how difficult robot navigation is. The rules consists of gradually increasing complexity, ranging from: "out-of-the-box-commercial-toy-robot" all the way to: "if-you-can-pull-this-off-sign-megamillion-deal-with-DARPA". Most contestants pull off levels 1 and 2. After that, it misses more often than it hits.

The following video shows that Thomas probably didn't read the rules too well, because his bot went south, ... literally.

Attempt #2, the following video shows the survival skills of Thomas, if you can't beat them - join them. If the bot doesn't want to go East to West, then do it North to South:

Here Rocky shows his superior dead reckoning skills:

Admirable performance by Ron:

In the following video, Rocky shows its wall following capability. It is following the left wall: