Hallway Contest June 2010

by Jef Mangelschots (June 2010)

the competition

In our June 2010 meeting we held what turned out a min-pre-trial-draft Hallway competition. Two people were brave enough to enter a robot: John Waters and another gentleman who I forgot to ask his name. If you read this, please identify yourself.

What was interesting was that these were new robots by first-time competitors. So this event ended up serving a purpose. There's nothing like demonstrating your bot to the grand public to find out all the little imperfections.

John Waters' bot behaved very well in the dead-reckoning category.  His robot sports some snazzy headlights. Fully realizing this is SoCal, and the danger of rolling blackouts is very real, John was not going to forfeit any RSSC competition. His bot WILL find its way around in the dark. He machined the wheels himself. They are very narrow, which helps out enormously dead-reckoning maneuvering. in It also sports a custom-build PIC board.

The second competitor, Dan, brought his first robot, which is a modified toy RC car with Ackerman steering. It is programmed in C++ and uses the FreeRTOS operating system for multitasking. He added a gyro sensor, which he uses to detect whether the robot sways off course and the software will try to compensate for that. Unfortunately, it did not work during the demonstration. No problem, it is more than most other people can claim. Better luck next time.

BTW, the rules for the Hallway competition can be found here. 

prizes

Our brave competitors went home with a complementary issue of Circuit Cellar, specially dedicated to robotics, and a full version of RoboRealm vision software.

The club has many more great prizes to hand out to any competitor, brave enough to show up with a bot. You don't even have to be a regular member. It pays to compete. Find out more about our prizes here.

video's

Here is a video of John Water's robot successfully navigating the hallway using dead-reckoning:

Here is a video of the unfortunate adventures of the second competitor: