robocup junior - the day

We have been busy preparing for this day for the past five weeks, two teams have been meeting each Tuesday and Thursday mornings at 7:30am at school constructing robots and programming them to meet the requirements for the robocup junior rescue. We have a year 13 team, and a year 11 team
Unfortunately the year 11 teams pulled out citing not enough time, however looking at today's challengers I believe that they would have managed to gain maximum points having seen what I am seeing today.

The year 13 students have been busy getting their programs ready for each round and challenging themselves to meet their own goals. Making there way through the field to the spill area.

Round One

- 44 points

Round Two

- Follow the line and hope for the best aka Operation Dad 34 points

Round Three

- back to basics (Where is the manual?) 12 points

Round Four -

Finding our way back, where is the program that we designed at school, oh yeah, its on the server that killed itself! - 10 points our worst one yet.

Round Five - Operation Turn right, earned us 48 points

One of our highest rounds, if only we had planned the speed bumps which caused us to get stuck, kind of like a boy racer on a Saturday night. Though had we got over this, we would have been caught at the water tower, the aim of this was just to get a far as possible for a suitable amount of points...

The water tank is behind the person on the floor.

A total of 148 points plus the interview points placed us second in the Auckland region, which is a great accomplishment. When we entered this we were just going for an experience and to see what it was about. It is a pity that the year 11 students did not join us, as it would have been nice to take home two trophies as I believe they would have accomplished some of the tasks better than the team.

look forward to 2010, though I hope it is in a bigger venue.

A couple of things, we will have to get some of our own tiles so we can do our own competition at school, a good thing to do if we go through with the suspend the timetable at the end of the year, this will provide an opportunity for the students to get involved in a team situation as I have seen today with problem solving, computer crashes and other issues. Second is the opportunity to enter another type of competition, I would like to enter the dancing comp, with something a bit different, where through the dance the robots draw a design on the floor, so at the end the operators can hold it up. We have two minutes max to do this, so it will have to be quick and crude, though this allows for the opportunity to run multiple robots, I think the most I saw today on the floor was 4, and that was a band.

the students have said they would like to have more time to do this, but talking with other students from other schools, it is normally a club environment at lunchtime where they have only been working on things for three weeks.

Thinking about the various types of dance today, there was no bollywood, how could we create our first robotic bollywood group.

Do we have enough equipment to handle future competitions?

Recording each round, we started off recording each round, but after the disaster of round 4 we thought we would not do any better on round 5, so we didn't record. This is likely to be an issue when we get to handing in the work required for the unit standard. That is why I have include photos on the blog here today, so we have a record of what has been done and what modifications were made.

twittering the event today also provided some information for people following me on what was happening, sorry for not including the fourth round results, I think it was more of the fact that it was a disappointing result that caused me not to put it up until after finding out that we had gained 2nd place.