by Alex Brown

Well, we had only two contestants for the contest, Derek Jones and Alex Brown.  Hence, we chose to make the even more of a demonstration than a real contest (i.e. with prizes and all).  Disclaimer.. Alex Brown is your humble secretary and is generating these minutes.  Hence, any bias in the contest description is to be expected.  And the reason why he didn’t get any pictures will become clear.

The first level of contest was a dead reckoning event where robots had to travel 50 feet down the hallway, stopping within 2 feet of the end wall, pivoting and returning to the start point. Derek Jones’ robot had some success but had some slow turning to the right problems and generally hit the wall before reaching the end of the hall.

Alex Brown’s robot proceeded down the hall quite straight, pivoted 180 degrees and proceeded toward its start point appearing to be within a few inches.  Unfortunately, the robot failed to stop at the start point and just kept going requiring a manual shutdown.  Hmmm, never did that all morning in practice.  So, I spent the remaining time trying to fix  my robot while Derek made a few more runs.

No one was ready for the second level of the contest; which was to  basically make the same run using a wall following technique.  So Bruce Weimer did a demo of his robot Leaf doing the third level which was to find colored circles on the floor, navigate to them and stop.  He was successful in this endeavor.

Pictures follow: