Jin Kai (in yellow) and his robot
Kelvin and his robot
Ian and his robot |
Edward and his robot |
HEI KERN:
Once again, a contest has resulted in me experiencing one of the most intense mornings of my life. I think we can almost make the rule of “something is bound to go wrong at the last min”, a law of science! No matter how much our group has invested in the planning process, we still run into problems, albeit smaller ones. But racing again the clock to prepare the robot for seeding is definitely not healthy for the heart.
Today I have learnt that the checklist is very important. To ensure that our robot works, we made this checklist where we follow religiously. It feels almost like we are dealing with a plane take-off and landing. But seeing our robot work really puts a smile on my face. Come tomorrow, it’s the brown team, our robots, against the world! Whatever results that come out, will be greeted with a pat on the back!!
JIN KAI:
A really interesting part of the competition is observing other teams testing out their robotic setup on the playing field. You get *cough cough* 'inspiration' on how to improve your own robot, or how NOT to make your own robot. So far, strategy has been an important element that some teams have thought in detail; their setups fulfill a 'golden triangle', being able to score many points, do it reliably and remain unperturbed by any nuisance robots that might possibly be sent over. However, luck will come into play tomorrow.
Crossing both fingers and toes!
KELLY:
We are finally nearing the end of the competition; today we said our goodbyes to the Pappalardo lab as we wrapped up the last of our fabrication efforts. However, things did not go too well for my team today - random electronic problems (e.g. jerking motors, poor connection between receiver and controller etc) cropped up and we spent the whole night troubleshooting. As a result, we did not have enough time to modify our programme for the cannon puller robot. I’m not very confident that it will work. Hopefully we’ll be able to go down to Studio 7 earlier tomorrow and test it out again.
On another note, our team went out together for dinner tonight. We had a lot of fun talking to each other and I feel really blessed to have such accommodating, kind and fun-loving people as my teammates. They are very skilful and smart too, and I have learnt a lot from them over the past few days. It has definitely been a good experience working with them.
GUAN XUN:
Today was a very interesting day. You can sense the difference in atmosphere around here, how things are starting to heat up and everyone is getting all anxious about having the robots work the way they want them to. The earlier part of the day was spent perfecting the robots, making all the improvements we thought would help solve the problems we envisioned. Then at about 4pm, we went for the seeding process, which really just gauges the standard of your team by collecting a raw score.
We were given 3 tries. After a lengthy set up process (trust me, these robots weren't made with a user-friendly operation in mind), we started our first try. And we got exactly zero points! Nothing worked, nothing moved. So that was quite scary for us, and after a little bit of fixing, we managed to score some points with the balloon blower robot, getting us 5 points. Just to give you a perspective though, some other teams scored more than a hundred points. So I guess you get where we stand among all the others.
But you don't! Because, as always, we went back and made modifications to our robots! We were one of the first to seed so that gave us considerably much more time to recover from our mistakes. One of the mistakes was that though we had tested the robots before when we built them, we never really got around to putting all the different robots together and testing them in their starting area. Having all of our robots in close proximity to each other created a very dense area that was prone to error and failure if precautions were not taken and checks not made.
By the end of the night though, we had made many improvements to how our robots work and that ensured that the whole process of operation just flowed smoother. For another huge part of the competition, the set up, the preparation, we came up with a checklist to tick off the stuff that we needed to ensure before beginning to battle an opponent. That turned out to be extremely useful and that might just get us some wins tomorrow.
Really, during the competition, there will be many many variables in the events that may occur, causing unpredictability in the expected results of the various teams. So I know it is going to be exciting and interesting, and that's good. Additionally, it would be nice if we could win some games so that we know that at least some of our hard work paid off! Half the teams will be getting kicked out in the first round though so there's a chance that we could be part of that. We'll see.
PENGHUI:
Damn, we just got back from Studio 7 after a night of rushing out our robots.
IT SUCKS. Professor Shaohui and I went bankai for an hour to rush out an arduino board to make our havocbot cause more havoc without us controlling it, and the bloody thing just blew up 5 minutes later, wasting all our efforts! Good grief.
And to add insult to injury, our balloon robot somehow can’t connect to the valve now.
All this, about 9 hours before the competition itself.
I’m not sure what we can do tomorrow to remedy that. But we will do something, definitely. And we just have to see what we can churn out in about half an hour’s time.
Anyway, these are our final 3 robots. :)
The police-car picker, the balloon pumper and the havocbot.
Cheers. Hope it goes well tomorrow.
AND OMG IT’s THE 3rd last day. :(
YONG CHENG:
There was not enough time. That is what I would say to summarise the whole day. We tried to make all necessary improvements for both our robots and had planned to try them on the playing field in the afternoon. However, the machining was more tedious and time consuming than we thought and we had only the chance to test them properly in the evening.
All of us had to send our scores for seeding before 5pm but our team could not make it in time. It was because we had to programme and make necessary mechanical tweaks to the design of our robots. I guess the reason why we had to improve so much was because we had little experience in robotics and we did not really plan much for the whole robot beforehand. I guess the planning also has to stem out from the experience because we don’t really know the kind of problems we have to face and the type of aspects we have to consider as a whole. In the end, we had to go with the method of trial and error. I wouldn’t say that is bad, but it is definitely time consuming and time is a very important factor especially in a 2 week competition like the IDC Robocon.
So I guess we scored 0 for the seeding round. We have been paired with the Lime Team which is Kelly’s team for the first round. We know that they have consistent robots that will pose as very difficult opponents for us. However, for now we are trying to focus only on our robots, to make it the very best and effective it can ever be. If we manage to attain that, I believe we still stand a good chance of winning. Tomorrow’s going to be the big day, and I can say with confidence that everyone still doesn’t believe that they have completed their designs. If given more time, they would definitely still want to make many more improvements on their robots.
It was definitely very tiring for us today because all of us were in a rush to give our robots a trial in the evening. Everyone was queuing up and gearing up for their turn at the side of the table. We were like living on adrenaline because we had only like 10 minutes of time to test our robots. This is to allow other teams to have a chance to have their trial too.
Overall, I would say that our robots can be consistent to a percentage of 70%. Most of the point scorings will be dependent on the user controls. Benoit is controlling the scoring robot while I am controlling the bother-not. I really hope that the bother-bot will come in useful for tomorrow.
Alright, so I should have a good rest tonight... Wish me luck everyone (:
EDWARD:
Formally introducing to you... Jacks-in-a-Box! And its side kicks! (that in the corner with the red wheels, is Munchie.)
After spending sleep-deprived days and nights, we finally put our robots to the test.
@ 1700hrs, just before the lab closed, we rushed to do our only run to get a seeding score. It was our first and the last trial with all the components.
We got a meagre score. Less than a day before the actual contest, and that’s all we can manage? Pathetic.
But guess wad? We joked about it on the way up and thought that we fared quite well for the first run. I was really glad we saw beyond that failure. It’s not over. It has not even begun.
Then we changed our strategy. We created Munchie.
That’s Munchie munching on our lunch banana.
And that’s him munching on the police car.
(: Basically, our strategy was to simplify everything, and enjoy the contest. (that certainly does not mean we are not challenging for the best)
We spent 10 days building our robots and not more than 6 minutes using it on the contest table. How else can we maximise our experience?
@ 2100hrs in Studio 7, everyone was in a panic to resolve all their problems and complete their robots. But guess what?
Do you see us in the second photo below? Yep, that Grey Team at the back of Studio 7 (; We were trying to make the most out of the night.
We 'built' our own mock-up contest table and were having fun practising with our robots (:
Now that’s a happy Grey Team. We're having fun, so watch out for us!
P.S. Kelsey brought us to one of the larger auditoriums in MIT. Wonder why they are still using chalkboards. Traditional stuff. Nice.
IAN:
Finally, we have reached the last day for robot-building. It's also seeding day.
After a relatively relaxed day yesterday, my team spent an entire day trying hard to solve our Arduino programming woes. Since today was our first and last day to programme our Caltech cannon-pulling robot, even our "pro" programmer Ravi could not help but give up using Arduino to automate the action of attaching our robot's hook to the cannon. So far, the only team whose robot which could consistently attach to the cannon was that of Brown, so we were still doing ok without programming our robot. So I guess we mostly ended the day at where we were yesterday -- ready for the competition, but unable to win at cannon-pulling.
Brown Team had successfully programmed their cannon-pulling robot.
The other teams were scrambling to get their act together. One problem after another were revealed in quick succession. For some, in their haste, unexpected disappointments struck. Groups with balloon air pump robots were frantically trying ways to prevent air leakages. Copper couldn't get their "do-everything" robot to not topple while lifting the police car. Orange fried one of their Arduino units. Long queues formed over at the contest table. Even Grey had to re-create a contest table using masking tape at the back of the Studio to test their cool-looking robots. Other teams continued pitting their robots against one another in robo-fights.
The crowd at the contest table.
Guan Xun programming his robot.
Jin Kai tries to fix his balloon air pump robot's air leakage.
A friendly fight between a police car robot and a bother-bot.
Despite the competitive atmosphere, teams were helping one another. My team got help from Marlon (Gold team) who tried to programme our FM transmitter to work properly with our Arduino unit. We also helped Laura (Pink team) to get her photoresistor attached to her team's Arduino unit.
Marlon helping us out.
At 1600hrs, my team got the chance to do our seeding at the Studio. It was our first time getting our robots to work together. Well, things could not have gone more horribly wrong. Our cannon-pulling robot did not manage to hook onto the cannon. Our ball-dropping robot only managed to throw/drop a single ball while the rest got stuck (This had never happened before!). At least we managed to put the police car on the dome. But we broke the plane of symmetry. In total, we received a poor first seeding score of 30. Admittedly, our score was better than many teams, who were struggling to break double-digit scores (presumably due to nervousness). But we didn't see the need to make changes to anything as it was just the convergence of bad luck in a single moment. No matter how good we make our robots to be, the element of luck will always be there.
As a final word...
