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Watch Heise's Robot Challenge In Progress
osolemirnix writes: "Starting today, the Robot Challenge initiated by c't Magazine / Heise Publishing takes place at the Systems computer fair show in Munich, Germany. The robots have to collect trash while driving through a maze (2x3 meters) and and deliver the trash in a special color-coded area. They have about 40 entries of bots and the challenge goes on all week, so check it out if you're at the Systems. Unfortunately the robot challenge web pages are in german, but you can check the live webcams here." So either quickly learn German, or use the Fish. The current c't (print) magazine has great pictures of the competing robots, too.
google translation [translate.google.com]
turn up the jukebox and tell me a lie
Robot Challenge link from the story.
What were the skies like when you were young?
A place this side of the atlantic that has robot competitions is the Exploratorium in SF. They have different categories, including Sumo Wrestling Robots. This year's competition was last month, here's a list of the events. A few years ago I saw this in person and thought it was great (very crowded, though). Too bad I'm on the other coast now.
The first day of the robot contest is over and Heise Online has posted a report on some of the most memorable events. Here's the translation of the linked page:
Today was the first day of the c't robot challenge at the Systems in Munich and a rather simple construction based on Lego Mindstorms made for a genuine surprise: The roughly soccer ball sized robot, which isn't equipped with any kind of camera sensors und is thus called "Stevie Wonder" by its creators, completed the "cleaning bot" challenge in only 6 minutes and 24 seconds on its second attempt. On the first attempt it had erroneously moved one of the garbage objects out of the target area and on the third attempt it drove onto a wooden garbage object of the "cigarette box" type, making the tracks lose ground contact. According to the contest rules, the best - the second - attempt counts. "Stevie's" success was above all astounding because, though being a relatively simple robot compared to other constructions in this contest, it unerringly moved the red cans and wooden cuboids, which served as garbage objects, into the blue "recycling area". The construction team around Wolfgang Lang from Roetenbach first anticipated problems connected to the cigarette box sized wooden objects: The "Stevie" creators had expected real cigarette boxes and had therefore built the robot with that kind of less sturdy lightweight objects in mind. Then however, two hair ties, which they borrowed from a Heise employee, were successfully used to tune "Stevie's" mechanics.
This day's other candidates had to face more or less serious disappointments: Wolfgang Draxinger's Fishertechnik Computing based "Mr. Proper" suffered from blasted power transistors, which forced the student to do without the intelligently designed gathering mechanics of his robot and instead redesign concept and software to use only pushing. Since some contestants didn't show up, the referees could grant him some time for reprogramming, but in the end, "Mr. Propper" wouldn't move at all, or required interactive commands respectively, so Draxinger had to give up with a heavy heart.
Team Metavox from Meerbusch had some more success: Their swivel flap equipped "Metabot", which is based on a self-made platform, showed a heart-warming tendency to hug walls, but at least mastered part of the challenge. In the first two rounds, it didn't manage to leave the starting room. In order to create a secondary ranking for those robots, which couldn't find the target area on their own, the referees allowed the camera equipped "Metabot" to start right in the doorway to the room with the target area, after which it moved five of six garbage objects into the recycling area after all. In order to find the direction of choice, the robot turns in small steps and tries to estimate distances. Then it rushes in the direction with the most free space at rather high speed. In doing so it hit walls and corners several times. The design team around Christian Winkgen shrugged off the orientation weaknesses of the rolling speed merchant: "Metabot" had been built for fun, and maybe it simply had a hard time correctly telling the colors of the contest arena apart.
The contest continues. Right now, "Stevie" is not only the audience's favorite, it is also on top of the current rankings. But nothing is decided yet: If all contestants who have been assigned a timeslot show up, there will be 33 more performances. Today three of the candidates where absent without notice, so it can't be predicted what will happen in the next days, but the contest will certainly stay exciting.