PENGHUI:
And it’s finally over.
It’s been an amazing two weeks. We started out from having ideas on drawing boards, papers, scrap material… and over the course of these 12 days it transformed into fully functioning robots.
For the record, we didn’t do that great. We got knocked off at the round of eight because the starting mechanism for our robot didn’t work, and all three robots got stuck in the box in the beginning.
The feeling kinda sucked. :(
Yet this competition brought 64 people from 9 countries together. We had language and culture barriers, but they seemed like meaningless obstacles in the face of a common love for engineering and robotics. We communicated with wood, aluminum, ideas and passion. It’s amazing how far those things can bring us. It really is. :)
I don’t have a picture that can sum everything up, but this is the closest one that I can think of.
This is “la French Touch”.
KELLY:
Robocon 2011 ended with a bang today! Even though my team lost in the first match because of a small technical error, it was okay as I think the loss actually brought us closer and made us realise that the friendships forged were much more important than the results of the competition.
After the competition in the morning, we had a rest and then I went out for dinner with my team at Chinatown. With the stress of the competition off our shoulders, we were finally able to fully enjoy each other’s company and take our time to have a good dinner.
Then we took a bus over to the MIT museum (I was late so I missed the Singaporean food presentation) and saw the other countries like Brazil, Thailand, Morocco and Japan put up entertaining performances. It was like an international cultural presentation packed in a fun-filled half hour. After the presentations, we checked out the cool exhibits at the museum which featured the genius of MIT students/alumni. When it was time to leave, I said my goodbyes to my teammates unwillingly and we promised to stay in touch.
It’s been a long and mostly tiring 2 weeks, but it has also been the experience of a lifetime. Never before have I worked with such a diverse group of people coming from all over the world. I really enjoyed the learning process. Besides the technical stuff like Solidworks and machining, I also learnt how to communicate effectively with my teammates and how to interact with people from different cultures. Most importantly this competition has allowed me to confirm my interest in engineering and robotics. Thank you SUTD for the chance to have this wonderful experience!
IAN:
This was the most exciting day and here was how it went.
We woke up to eat our final breakfast,
attend a quick final briefing,
and were plunged straight into the action.
Penghui's team transports their robots to the competition venue.
Getting our robots ready in standby outside the venue.
Last-minute tinkering by Yong Cheng's team.
Welcome to Robohacks!
Dan Frey hosted the competition. He kept the spectators entertained with an enthralling commentary.
Dan the commentator.
Finally, Blue and Cardinal, the first teams to compete, raised their thumbs-up to signal that they were ready to start.
The moment before the start of the first contest.
My team was fourth to compete. We were up against Gold (Jin Kai's team) who were on the right side. We made mental checklists to make sure everything was in order. We were expecting to beat Gold.
Team Purple ready for deployment.
Both Gold and us got 5 points for dropping our superballs. Our police car bot was disabled by Gold's bother-bot (Ravi later said that he should have flipped over the bother-bot with our robot's powerful arm.). Then, Gold was 4 points ahead of us after they pumped up their balloon 4 litres. But something was wrong with my team's cannon-pulling robot; the motor couldn't unwind the string that was attached to the hook, so we could not even head to the far left side of the table to pull the cannon to our side. By then, Gold tried to head to the right far side of the table to pull the cannon to their side, but they were unable to move into position too (I think they accidentally blocked themselves.). So the match ended that way. No multiplier for any of us. 5-9. We had lost. I later discovered that the 3-pin power connector to the motor disconnected half-way during the match. Just plain unlucky.
Many times did matches ended in draws. The dreaded, yet exciting moment of putting your robots on the balance and hoping that your robots were lighter than those of your opponent came. Below, we see Copper (Yong Cheng's team) and Lime (Kelly's team) comparing the masses of their robots. Copper won against the almighty but unlucky Lime.
Comparing the masses of their robots.
Quite a number of teams were knocked out merely because their photoresistor failed to work properly, thus preventing them from starting their Arduino units' programmes and manually controlling their robots after 20 seconds. Below, we see Orange failing to start up their point-scoring robot, hence letting Gold triumph over them in the quarter-finals.
The dying moments of Orange vs Gold.
The 5-minute-long setting up phase before Blue vs Copper.
Gold continued its dream run through to the finals, meeting the ever-consistent Brown (Hei Kern's team). Only once, when it faced Army in the quarter-finals, did Brown suffer a scare after their cannon-pulling robot failed to autonomously catch on to its target in the first 20 seconds. As a result, both teams, at 35 points, were pulling the cannon at once. In the dying seconds, Army's cannon-puller robot's string snapped dramatically, letting Brown clinch the coveted multiplier. The crowd erupted at their well-deserved win. On the other hand, Gold faced 3 teams in a row whose robots failed all expectations during their particular matches. Gold vs Brown was could be compared to David vs Goliath. As expected, Brown trampled over Gold to win the finals.
Here's another video of the Finals.
The moment immediately after Brown's win.
Mao Yichao, the ever-expressive one, basks in glory again, during prize-giving.
Gold is absolutely delighted to have got 2nd.
The final results of IDC Robocon 2011 reflected in the tournament bracket.
Purple Team, with our robots.
There was some free time after the competition to get our presentation at MIT Museum prepared. So Shaohui, Edward, Yong Cheng, Hei Kern and I zoomed off to Chinatown's Penang restaurant to get some Singaporean (To the discerning tongue, it was really Malaysian cuisine.) cooked food. On the way, we visited the Apple store at CambridgeSide Galleria!
Robocon. Now available on iPad.
Penang restaurant
The first Nasi Lemak I have had in weeks!
Over at the MIT Museum, the 10 of us lined up in front of everyone to present our delicious Singaporean food to our international friends. We gave them samples of satay, chicken rice, beef rendang, Penang char kway teow, chinese new year cookies and prawn rolls. Too bad our bak kwa was confiscated at US customs.
Sharing chicken rice with the rest. Food from Singapore never fails to whet one's appetite.
Here are snippets of the fun and enriching items our international friends put up:
Zhejiang's Chinese song item.
Morocco's presentation on, er, Morocco.
Thailand presented a traditional dance item.
Laura from Brazil dances pretty well too.
Brazil did a Q&A cum audience participation item, a dance item and a "fighting" item.
Lucas engages poor Benoit in a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu neck lock.
Lucas pins Sebastien to the ground.
Japan Tokyo Tech's origami crane item.
If there were one museum I would recommend any engineer to go to in Cambridge, it would be the MIT Museum. The are amazing holograms and cool antiques to amaze anyone enough. What takes the prize are the mechanical engineering exhibits. Take for example, the exhibit, Beholding the Big Bang, which shows sets of reduction gears that results in the last gear only completing one rotation in 13.7 billion years.
Beholding the Big Bang
IDC Robocon 2011 had been a blast from day 1. We were thrown into teams consisting of different nationalities, cultures, languages and educations. With that handicap, we were given a tough problem. Within two weeks, we had to devise strategies, manage our teams and talents well, ask for a lot of help from instructors, fabricate robots from scratch, programme robots and test robots. Despite having so much to do but so little time, we persevered and stayed up late at night to complete our robots. Such was the multi-dimensional experience we all had gone through.
Robocon was bittersweet for me. My team lost in the first round, like half of the teams in the contest. Failure struck when we least expected it. The feeling of loss was made worse by knowing the fact that my team and I worked long and hard to build our robots and bring our strategy to fruition. But as we worked together to achieve a common goal, we bonded together as a team and became great friends who will continue to stay in contact with one another. When we didn't know how to proceed, we could count on others, both international friends and instructors, to show us the way; that was how we made more friends. Robocon was, indeed, a successful experiment on international collaboration. Furthermore, Robocon was the two weeks in which I attained a preview of life as an student in a foreign land. There was so much about independence and people skills that I practiced and learnt during my stay. As a future electrical engineering student who has almost zero knowledge in robotics and mechanical engineering, Robocon was also a two-week basic practical crash course that taught me many things about them and engineering in general. Definitely, there was so much I gained from being part of Robocon.
I wish to thank everyone, organisers and participants, for making Robocon as fun as it could be. I wish SUTD all the best in pursuing its dream to become a world-class design and engineering institution. You have the most passionate of students in your founding cohort, so I'm sure your dream will come through in the near future.
That said, I am already starting to feel hungry for more fun international events.