KELLY:
Today we spent the whole day at the Pappalardo lab machining and watching our robots take shape. We are mostly done with robots 1 and 2, the police-car-lifter and cannon-puller respectively (I think we should come up with more creative names for them soon!).
Here are some photos of our robots:
Learning to work with the cool machines in the lab was quite fun for me as I only had limited exposure to a few basic machines in Sec 1 DnT lessons. In the lab, we could shear metal, mill plastic, heat-bend all sorts of materials and had lots of material such as drill bits of all sizes made available to us. In MIT there really is no limit to your imagination.
For dinner we ventured a little further and took the train downtown for ‘the best burgers in America’. This time I am proud to say I finished my food!
We also stopped by several MIT and Harvard co-ops where we bought some clothes and other stuff. Then, I went back to the lab to do some more work and finally headed back to Baker at 10.30pm.
EDWARD:
Our group understood that although designs may appear perfect and effective on paper, the problems will not surface until we actually tested the completed robot. Henceforth, we decided to get down to action and carried out some intensive fabrication from the morning. Our design changes significantly along the fabrication process, as we realised issues that we have not seen previously.
The Pappalardo Lab, was amazing, truly. When they said that in the Pappalardo lab, the only thing limiting your design was your imagination, it did not actually mean that the lab has an unlimited number of different equipments. What was amazing about it was the lab crew - they had a vast amount of experience and knowledge to harness their range of equipment and tools in an unlimited number of ways (they were very friendly and helpful of course!).
However enjoyable the process of materialising our robot designs may be, we ought to stay focused on our tasks and the time we have left before the actual contest. Precision is critical in our robots. We seek to minimise all the risks and variable factors that may exist in a contest.
MIT Hacks continue to fascinate me. How nice would it be if we could pull off a just as impressive one back in SUTD. Check out some of the hacks documented in the photos below (click to see the enlarged version)!
Love the idea of not preparing slides for a brief/presentation! (: Saves the time, save the effort, save the unnecessary fanciful slides. Gives us more time to focus on what really matters. Let's hope we can do that in Singapore as well (without having our grades affected of course).
GUAN XUN:
Day 4 is over! Nobody lives in the future, but I can just imagine exactly how the competition is going to be over in just a snap and I'll be back in Singapore going about everyday life. Maybe I think too much sometimes.
Today, I've made much progress in learning about how to use and program the Arduino microcontroller (which in kinda like a brain, a minicomputer) together with other hardware objects such as a motor or a photoresistor. It's something that I've never done before and always wanted to do, so I can answer a very full 'yes' and not be lying at the same time if I am asked if I learned anything from Robocon! Many thanks to the instructors at Robocon who've helped me along this process, especially Shao (who's also going to teach me at SUTD in the future).
Our team, as all teams did, made a presentation to the Robocon instructors about the design concept and ideas that we had for our robots nd gained much valuable feedback and commentary. Our team members took turns talking about the robots which I feel is good because it ended up being a team effort at the presentation, instead of a more one-sided thing whereby the better English-speakers just went ahead and spoke about the robots.
We've already completed our first robot yesterday and are just starting working on the second one. Hopefully by tomorrow we can finish the second robot and that would leave us with just one major modification to make as well as the minor improvements and modifications we can make to better our existing robots. So, as you can see, there's still some work to be done.
For dinner, we the Singapore team got together (with the exception of Jin Kai, who was bound to his group) to have dinner at a burger restaurant, apparently the best in Boston. The burgers weren't especially large in diameter, but the beef patties in the burgers were amazing. Not only were they full of flavour, they were really thick too! So that was really satisfying and definitely worth a try for anyone who happens to drop by in Boston. The restaurant is in Harvard (the place). So after that we toured Harvard for souvenir shopping and sightseeing. It was all wonderful and I hope we can spend more time touring!!
TAT LEONG:
Today was basically finalising our design of our robots. Then, we presented it to the staff.
Team mate, Laura presents
No one thought about the energy budget and we wanted to make three robots which were very energy intensive. So we are kinda demoralised as all our ideas are infeasible one way or another so we had to make major modifications. But after a while we realised there’s no time to get demoralised. So we went back to the drawing board and started again.
Here’s us testing the light sensor of our ball dropping robot. Using the camera flash to trigger the robot to start moving to its designated location.
Could not find a weighing scale in Studio 7 (lazy to get 1 from Pappalardo Lab which is 5 floors down) so we used the seesaw method to find the weight of the car.
Some wind chime lookalike thing between 2 mrt tracks. So I think the hammers are either controlled or they probably just swing due to change in air pressure when trains pass by.
PENGHUI:
Day 3 passed – another day of designing, drilling, cutting and building. It’s getting pretty routine in the sense that from the second we finish breakfast we’ll start work all the way till 5.
So let me give you a sense of how our schedule looks like.
Reveille: 0630hrs.
Breakfast: 0710hrs.
Daily Morning briefing: 0800hrs.
Start work: 0830hrs.
Drill wood: 0900hrs.
Drill holes: 0905hrs.
Drill wood: 0910hrs.
Attach wood with metal: 0920hrs.
Think & stare blankly into space: till 1000hrs.
Re-drill wood: 1005hrs.
And so on...
We break for lunch, and continue till 1700hrs.
Then we’ll eat dinner, and get back to work till about 2200hrs.
It sound seriously repetitive, but believe me when I say I’m having the most fun that I’ve had in a while. :)
KELVIN:
This is the room where we stayed. There is housekeeping to tidy the room for us everyday, like some kind of “hotel service”. The laundry service is available at 75 cents per usage.
This is the Pappalardo Lab for us to use. It is very big and clean. It's also equipped with all kinds of machinery.
The instructors in the lab were very helpful in helping us with fabrication.
This is our competition ground. We are given two weeks to build a robot and compete against each other.
YUMMY! After all the hard work, we finally get to rest and enjoy. Today we went to Harvard Square for burgers. This shop was voted by Wall Street Journal as one of the best American burger shops.
JIN KAI:
My thoughts on communicating with team mates despite the language barrier:
- It's not difficult to communicate a design. All we have to do is sketch it out. With some gesturing, what we want to achieve becomes clear.
- The harder part of communication is expressing a difference in opinions. So before we even get to a final design, we spend a lot of time debating the features we want (or not) in our robot, and it's hard to come to a consensus.
Some teams are on 'fast forward' mode and are just blazing through the work required, and have actually built whole robots.
I'm so tired!!! And it's not a given that there'll be results to show for it. Today I managed to make a one-way valve that will be useful during the challenge, which is a great thing. Nevertheless, every component has to fit together perfectly for our robot(s) to work. So while the one-way valve works now, I wouldn't know if this 'mini success' will actually be useful in the end.
YONG CHENG:
Another tiring day for my team and myself. Since the morning, we have been working in the workshop non-stop to try to finish the main parts for our robots. The main objective for our robot, I feel, is to be able to have as many functions as possible, though we do not have the time to finish all the tasks at one go. Think I have never mentioned this before, but we have a total of 2 minutes to score as many points as we can and the first 20 seconds of that must be automated – meaning that the robot must not be controlled by the user but by its own programme coding.
We also had our design brief presentation to some faculty in the afternoon. We almost were late because we forgot about the time while in the workshop. Luckily, by the time we reached the meeting room, the previous team was still presenting their design. I thought that our presentation went quite well. We were quite sure of what our robots want to achieve and it seemed that the faculty were quite satisfied with it. Apart from trying to do too much (though we explained that we just want to add as many functions as possible and some may not be used), the other feedback were mainly reminders to prioritize certain features of our robots and to come up with a strategy on how we are going to play the game. For all these, we already had something in mind. What is left is building it, heh! (:
We went to Harvard Square after 5pm via the train.
In the train... |
Edward trying to act serious (joke) but failed. |
We had burger at a place called Bartley’s which seemed quite popular as there were many already dining when we arrived. The burgers there were all named after special people and items such as Lady Gaga and the iPhone. It was really funny because even though they were named this way, we still had a difficult time choosing which name/burger we wanted. We then strolled around Harvard Square including the Harvard Co-op Store which I bought a Nalgene bottle from.
All are named after famous people and other stuff!
(Click to see enlarged version)
Ian and company at the other table… They can’t make their decision too.
My burger with fried sweet potato… Umphh!
I then returned to Studio 7 to go back to my team to finish up the work for the day. We kind of promised the faculty during the presentation that we would finish the robot’s arm by tomorrow. Right now, we have built the infrastructure. What is left to assemble the pieces and to mechanize it. I hope that all will go well
HEI KERN:
Today, I will not be talking about the competition. Instead, I want to talk about our little trip to Harvard square for dinner. At dinner, We had this awesome milkshake and burger. Let me elaborate more on the meal. Meals here in America are of huge proportions. Never had I ever been able to finish one meal myself. So I was particularly satisfied when I was able to finish my burger today! The food, by the way, tasted awesome! I had a beef burger with swiss mushrooms.
Oh!! Today I did my laundry in an American laundry shop! I know it might sound funny but I have always watched people doing laundry in the movies and had imagined myself doing the same. Today I got to do that!! However, when I got to bed to wait for half an hour for my clothes to dry, I was so tired that I fell asleep. In the end, Edward helped me transfer my clothes to the dryer and I got my clothes done. THANKS EDWARD!!
IAN:
The same walk from Baker House to the studio.
The same breakfast.
The same awkward silence that punctuates the morning briefing session.
The same team members, Lucas and Takashi.
Everything is settling into routine.
Then, it happened. My team was told that a MIT student would join us to boost our numbers. We had barely survived with only 3 members for 2 days. We couldn't produce anything substantial due to our lack of experience in the various expertises required. At this time, the other teams were programming their first robots, tinkering their robots with water jet-made pieces and making elaborate robotic arms.
But Ravi, the MIT student, was a computer science student who was suddenly pulled in to participate in the competition. Not the mechanical engineering student we were looking for who would have already participated in a competition similar to IDC Robocon 2011. So we were struggled for a while, trying to explain our ideas to him. Soon enough, his naturally-assumed leadership came into action, and we stopped deliberating and started to do something. By the time of our robot design presentation at 4pm, we had a rough action plan to tackle the RoboHacks challenge.
Entering the dark room filled with instructors and professors to present our project was indeed intimidating. Their intense faces and our lack of organisation made matters worse. But from the broad plans we had already discussed, Ravi painted a picture of the details at whim. At times, the professors grilled him, but he confidently responded with our intention to investigate their doubts. We came out of the room having a good laugh, amazed by his presentation skills; things could have been worse. Our "punishment": Dan gave us an assignment to do quick-and-dirty calculations on a parameter of our choice that was to be presented the next day at 5pm.
Yes, my team is arguably the team with the least progress with our robots. But we all know that the slow and steady wins the race. There's still hope, with our 4th member, the MIT student.