TAT LEONG:
Today was basically an intro on all the facilities and getting into our teams. The jetlag is killing me. Woke up at 2 plus and slept on and off before finally getting up at around 5 plus.
Anyway, I got into the pink team. I have a Japanese on my team – Maeda Shunn (Yong Cheng lookalike) and a Brazilian – Laura. It was great fun working with one another and trying to communicate with one another. Fortunately, I know a bit of Jap and there’s always Google Translate. Three of us do not know how to do computing but I guess we can always learn during the arduino workshop and just ask for help from the assistants. I mean it will be a good experience for us to program our own robot. But of course, I think we are expecting a Chinese and Moroccan to join our group because every group is supposed to have 5 members.
The cool thing about MIT is there’s so much space for brainstorming. Initially we were discussing in studio 7 and it was so noisy and the environment wasn’t conducive so we went out and had our brainstorming session on a bench along the Charles River (too bad I didn’t bring my camera). The change of environment was just mentally stimulating.
Went to the pappalardo lab. It’s really fully equipped. The coolest equipment was probably the water jet. The MIT staff were really hospitable and supportive of this event.
Great start for robocon, I would say. Other than the jetlag. Not forgetting breakfast and lunch too – but it’s free so no complaints. XD
JIN KAI:
ORIGAMIT
Metal Sculpture
Cannon
A whirlwind of activities today: Introduction to IDC, the competition details, the labs, the box of materials we could use to build our robots...
Papparlado Lab
A machine in the Papparlado Lab
In a team with a Brazillian and Japanese. Communication is HARD.
My team mates and I
Basically a lot of emphasis on safety, given that some of the power tools are dangerous and that we have little to no experience working with them.
Went for seafood at 'Legal Seafood'. Ordered Ciopinno, which is some kind of tomato broth with mussels, scallops, prawn with oven-toasted bread and rice (for soaking up the broth to eat).
A lot of interesting ideas generated for the contest. Some are brilliant, some work on sabotaging the other team - we'll see how things turn out on Wednesday, when we have the first presentation of ideas to the faculty.
EDWARD:
I was thoroughly impressed and excited when the theme of this year's Robocon was revealed. Shocking as it may be to some, this year's contest celebrated the great MIT hacks of all times. The essence of an MIT hack is about how students push their boundaries and challenge the normality of life by pulling some of the most cleverly devised schemes ( though some prefer to call it pranks), using engineering and scientific skills. You can find out more about MIT Hacks.
This phenomenon in itself is already impressive, and yet to design a Robocon after the MIT hacks is equally inspiring. Quite different from last year's Robocon, this year's contest environment would allow the team much space to not only design and built a good robot, but also to devise an effective strategy to make the most out of the given resources. A series of tasks can be performed to attain points, yet the constraints of the contest would force every team to ponder hard on their approach. For, given the limited time, limited space and limited resources, a team will have to forgo the points of performing certain tasks, and complete the remaining tasks with a potent strategy.
Grey Team
Having group members who have much experience and knowledge to share definitely enhances my learning process. Communication barrier between foreign languages remains a challenge that we have to surmount over the next few days, but the positive attitude of my group makes it an enjoyable process. For now, I just can't wait to lay my hands on the tools and start turning our sketches into physically moving pieces.
One very important thing I learnt today. Never order more than your stomach can take. Especially when you are already running late. Clams and mussels won't help.
IAN:
When I woke up today at 5.45am, the sun was already up. Perhaps that forced me to wake up, despite sleeping at 1am the previous day.
Prof. Dan Frey gave the IDC Robocon participants a short tour of MIT and Building 3, where the Mechanical Engineering department is located.
We then proceeded to a lecture hall where Prof. Dan introduced the IDC Robocon participants to the organisers and sponsors of IDC Robocon 2011.
Sheryl a.k.a. Sergeant came to gave us a MIT Police talk. It was so funny to hear her poke fun on Harvard. And we could feel that she held a legendary status on campus.
I’ve always known hacking to be quintessential MIT. So I was pleasantly surprised by the task assigned to us. Using robots to recreate them on a model? Wow! This school is fun.
RoboHacks
The Caltech cannon! |
The MIT Dome |
I was assigned to the purple team. I had a Brazilian and a Japanese in my team. It’s a rather small team for a monumental task. I consider myself lucky to find that the Brazilian student and I could easily communicate our preliminary ideas in English, and the Japanese student could understand enough English to understand our thoughts; I found a team that was a Brazilian-Thai-Japanese combo – a team in which no one speaks the same language. Now, that’s a scary Tower of Babel-like situation!
We spent the afternoon in the workshops, learning much about safety and our tools. Rather boring, but necessary. Anyway, we got to play with some robots.
Dinner was at Legal Sea Foods.
They serve great calamari. |
Who could miss out on the New England Clam
Chowder in New England? |
Just when we thought we were ordering only 1 plate of bake stuffed lobster, we received super-sized 2 plates! We really didn’t expect a large clan of clams. And I’m no clam-eater! Oh well, this is America, where everything is served in mega-large quantities. Good thing is, everything can be "tabao"-ed.
KELLY:
Robocon 2011 officially kicked off today! We were all really excited as we, together with many aspiring young engineers from all over the world, made our way to the main MIT building in the morning.
The task for Robocon 2011 was quickly revealed – we would have to build a robot to replicate ‘hacks’, or practical jokes, that MIT students had carried out over the past few decades. I thought it was a rather whimsical and entertaining choice of topic and was quite excited to get started.
After the briefing we got to meet our teams. My team consists of one Japanese, one Chinese and one MIT guy, and me. They were all university students with a fair amount of experience in robotics and engineering, and I learnt a lot from them today. I’m sure the learning will continue over the course of the next two weeks.
After a tiring day familiarizing ourselves with the workshop, (most of) the Singapore contingent went out for an awesome seafood dinner! The Lobster Bake (or what we call the Boston Experience) consisted of really fresh and appetizing lobsters and mussels and a clam chowder soup that was really good.
Our team continued our discussion at Baker House after dinner and finalized our main strategy for the competition. We plan to get our designs out by tomorrow, which should leave us plenty of time for machining. It’s going to be a long day ahead!
GUAN XUN:
So we started IDC Robocon. After a thorough and lengthy competition briefing, we were split into our groups. I'm in group Pebble! Together with me I have Richard, an MIT student, Tatae, from Tokyo Institute of Technology and Hu, from Shanghai. Takae and Hu can't understand my English if I speak too fast so I try to speak slower to them. Sometimes I try to translate in my broken Chinese too to Hu. It’s all good though; our team dynamics seem to be working out well even with the communication problem, ensuring that our team made progress.
Our objective for the first day was very simple: to determine which tasks in the mission to undertake and which one we would do best at. MIT student Richard was a great help really, as the students from MIT had done this project as a class previously, although now there were some changes to the mission. So we all went back to our rooms at night and each came up with our own ideas about the design of the robots, which we would discuss in depth with each other tomorrow.
HEI KERN:
I thought yesterday was tiring. Today was worst!! Don’t get me wrong, I totally love this experience. It is just that, after such a long day, I feel totally spent. This tired feeling feels awesome in fact, I feel that I have put my all in whatever I am doing today and I feel I have achieved something.
So today is the first official day of IDC ROBOCON 2011. It started out relatively early in the morning at 8:00 and soon we were touring the different labs and getting ourselves orientated to what resources are given to us to build the robot.
I got a team that consists of the following countries; America, China, Japan and Singapore. I feel that the team I have got so far is a very balanced team as we have to mechanical engineers and two software people. Tell you more about my team as I know them more!: ) As for now, This is a picture of our team. I will take another picture when our last team member, most likely Moroccan, arrives.
YONG CHENG:
Today marks the first day of the IDC Robocon. We all woke up around 6.45am early in the morning to prepare for the first activity of the day – a short tour in the MIT main building and then breakfast! We were then briefed about the format of the game and then given our teams.
The theme for this year is RoboHacks. We are supposed to emulate the famous hacks MIT had done in its whole history. This includes the police car on the top of the dome, superballs being dropped from the roof onto Killian Court, the Balloon that emerged from underneath during a football match between Harvard and Yale, and lastly the stealing of the cannon from Caltech. This is really interesting as it has been different from the past IDC Robocon Contests. We have to try to tackle several problems at one go.
We have to build a robot that can successfully accomplish the above mentioned tasks (of course not totally emulate them, but somewhat), and we will be given points depending on the level of success for each tasks.
The layout of the table (the playing field) that we will launch our robots in.
My team is the Copper Team, consisting of Benoit Reitz from Epita, France and Cai Yuan Nan from Jiao Tong University. We are still missing one more group member who may be someone from Korea or Morocco. We will have to wait till tomorrow to see who will join us.
I got the ticket to Copper Team
To introduce my teammates, Benoit is a 2nd year student in Epita, studying IT while Yuan Nan is still a freshman in Jiao Tong University waiting to major in Electrical Engineering. There was a bit communication problems since Benoit’s French accent wasn’t very clear to Yuan Nan. Luckily, I could understand both parties and tried to help them understand what they were talking about.
For my team, there is quite a mix of different disciplines. Benoit is good in IT programming while Yuan Nan is good in circuitry works. For me, I have a bit of experience in mechanical skills such as Solidworks which I have gained through my experience in International Design Centre (IDC) as a Research Assistant.
My new teammates – Yuan Nan (left) and Benoit (right)
All 3 of us were trying to figure out how we should tackle the problems in the playing field.
We were then given a tour around the Pappalardo Lab, Studio 7, the Central Machining Shop and several other areas that we would be visiting regularly. Dan Frey also gave us a talk about the safety handling some of the equipment that we were given in our kit.
After that, the Singaporeans group gathered again to go for dinner at Legal Seafood, a restaurant near MIT. We had baked lobster and my god, we really had an awesome Boston Experience!
Look at the stuffed baked lobster... |
Coupled with a whole plate of mussels and clams! |
It was seriously a huge huge serving and we barely could finish it.
Look at the amount of food we had!
A photo that was taken by the friendly waiter who served us.
Thank you Prof Shao Hui for bringing us to such an awesome place too! :D
After dinner, several of us went back to meet up with the different groups. As for me, I went to look for Benoit and Yuan Nan to discuss about our plans for the next day informally in Baker House. Looks like there is still a lot to be done for the whole competition. It is only the first day gone, and my team is already hoping to ‘kill’ off other teams…
Watch out for the COPPER TEAM everyone! Haha!