Subject:
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ECRG wrap up and notes
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.org.ca.rtltoronto
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Date:
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Tue, 29 Oct 2002 06:28:45 GMT
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Viewed:
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495 times
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Hey folks,
First off, I want to thank everyone for helping or offering to help:
attending ECRG (Derek), supplying demo robots (Derek and Dave), just
offering support (Dan O'Connell) etc.
ECRG, the Eastern Canadian Robot Games was a well attended event this
weekend, October 26-27, 2002 at the Ontario Science Centre. For our out of
province friends, the OSC is a huge, multi building complex that is an
interactive science museum-the exhibits are oriented towards video displays,
hands on experiments, live demonstrations, etc. Over the years, the OSC has
provided a number of well thought out (and sometimes controversial) exhibit
presentations, including ones on Food, Sport, Truth, Communication, etc,
many of which are still present in the lower halls.
ECRG had several games, including sumo, walker races, photovores, etc, many
of which were based upon the BEAM robot philosophy.* I'm not sure if some
of the stuff is really robotics-some of the sumo robots were remote
controlled like BattleBots and others were these solar driven "behavioural"
machines. Robot implies some sort of program control (software or hardware
in my mine) which these solar machines don't really do.
Of these, the most advanced and interesting was the Firefighting
competition, which Rob Stehlik entered. The idea was to build a robot that
autonomously traversed a simple maze with four "rooms", where a randomly
placed candle in a metal holder burns. Once you find the candle, you blow
the flame out. Best of three tries for each competitor, penalties for not
extinguishing the flame etc.
Most of the firefighting entrants were pretty impressive. Pretty well all
used microcontrollers, and while only Rob used Lego, others used some neat
ways of scratch building, including modifying existing wheeled toys as
bases, hacking servos to unlimited rotation etc.
Unfortunately, while Rob had the fastest time with his third try, a robot
built with a toy car as a base that randomly smashed into walls miraculously
found the candle by accident and blew it out within 12 seconds. Adding
insult to the injury, the robot was never programmed for the firefighting
competition, was built with electrical tape by what appeared to be snarky
high school kid, and in its previous try, took four minutes fumbling around
every room in a random pattern, then ran its battery dead. Oh well. I
suppose if a 1000 monkeys with 1000 typewriters...
Rob's robot was, in usual Rob style, elegantly executed. Dual RCXes drove a
seven motor machine with a synchro base for motion that turned an IR scan
head and fan in sync. As it drove around whisper quiet, the robot never
touched a wall, quickly glding from room to room with a wall following
algorithm. Very cool.
Both days I gave a presentation about Lego Robotics, pretty well the same
talk I gave at BrickFest 2002. I was told an audience of about 200 and
found myself in a room with 200 chairs and a giant projector screen, which
was nice. Unfortunately, due to scheduling problems, neither the fellow
from Bawtz.com talking about Sumo robots or myself got more than 20
attendees. At least they asked some good questions and I convinced several
concerned parents they should look into Lego Mindstorms instead of soldering
old Walkman parts together.
One of the weirdest things about talking at ECRG was while BrickFest was
mostly adult Lego fans, the audience was a wide range of ages. It's kind of
hard to go from showing videos of Lego robots to talking about validation
testing in one shot. At least the kids had fun chasing Dave's little robot
around.
Something thing that was VERY different about ECRG was the variety of
entrants. Unlike rtlToronto, where almost everyone is an adult professional
of some sort, ECRG had a much wider audience: High school kids, hackers, HAM
radio types. It's an interesting mix with a multitude of approaches: They
even had an art robot contest, with one entrant building a solar powered
dragon that flapped its wings and another with blinking geometric objects.
*-One item is a little troubling for me, and I suppose this is rampant
opinion: The BEAM robot concept is, paraphrasing one entrant's comments,
building a robot with the least amount of hardware possible. As far as I'm
concerned, it's utter crap thrown together on the hope that something useful
will happen. As a result, many of the BEAM competitions were really all
based on the difficult task of walking forward. One might say this is
analog computing or mimicking biological process, but I'm not sure if these
things are really a) representative of industrial application or b) useful
for anything more complex than walking around. What I suppose bothers me is
that someone can enter by taking a Discman, gluing two wheels to the sides,
adding a solar panel, and win by the pure fact his "robot" has large wheels.
Anyways, ECRG was an interesting outing. I'm glad to see it at a public
place like the Ontario Science Centre, and it's good to know people are
interested in it. Congrats to Rob on his 2nd place finish!
Calum
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Message has 3 Replies:
 | | Re: ECRG wrap up and notes
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| In lugnet.org.ca.rtltoronto, Calum Tsang writes: <snip> (...) I wanted to be there. I didn't get to the Big Smoke until 7 p.m. on Saturday, and Sunday I was in Belleville at a baptism and didn't get back to T.O. until 8 p.m.. Thus the weekend... So (...) (22 years ago, 29-Oct-02, to lugnet.org.ca.rtltoronto)
| | | Re: ECRG wrap up and notes
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| (...) Anyone I know? (you don't know their call sign do you?) I've been asking around on various repeaters if anyone is into robotics and I haven't found a fellow ham yet with that interest. Matthias Jetleb VA3-MWJ (22 years ago, 2-Nov-02, to lugnet.org.ca.rtltoronto)
| | | Re: ECRG wrap up and notes
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| "Calum Tsang" <tsangc@mie.utoronto.ca> wrote in message news:H4qCnx.2vA@lugnet.com... (...) I'm (...) useful (...) SCREAM!! DEATH DEATH DEATH omg that was death (...) is (...) sides, (...) wheels. NM!O!!!...!!! CANT BREATHE (22 years ago, 2-Nov-02, to lugnet.org.ca.rtltoronto)
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