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Yesterday, Sunday 26th March, we had our 4th Italian Legofest. This time our
traditional robotic contest was about line following, and 10 peopled
compared their ideas, their knowledge and their ability running their robots
for maximum speed on a 7m (23 feet) long 2.5cm (1 inch) wide black tape
winding line. The rules were: only original Lego parts, max 3 motors, max 1
light sensor, any other sensor allowed in any quantity.
Paolo Masetti gave everybody a humiliating lesson: his vehicle ran the path
in some hundreds less than 10 seconds, at the astonishing speed of 70cm/s
(2.3 feet/s). The second best robot took two and a half that time.
While running at that speed his robot was playing the Indiana Jones movie
theme too :-)
Paolo's robot performance deserved a spontaneous standing ovation from
everybody. We who had faced and understood some of the problems related to
high-speed line following were even more impressed.
I'm sure Paolo will be glad to describe in detail his robot if everybody's
interested, and I have pictures of it to be released in the www.itlug.org
site probably next week. Just to give a brief description Paolo's robot
featured a power and steer architecture, with some very original mechanical
solutions, like a rubber band to prevent any unwanted stroke between the
teeth of the steering gears (keeping them tightly coupled for faster and
more precise reaction).
But the most important point, IMO, is that Paolo's robot was the only one
that ran a legOs program. I absolutely don't want to say that Paolo won
*because* he used legOs, I just want to say his performance was *made
possible* by legOs, and in particular by its faster sensor sampling rate.
I must admit I never thought to the possible benefits coming from legOs in
terms of vehicle speed. I used legOs when I needed more memory, arrays or
computation intensive tasks, but never realised the importance of the fast
sensor reading until yesterday. The original firmware sampling rate was
simply too slow to allow prompt heading correction at that speed. I touched
the problem when preparing my own robotic vehicle but wasn't able to
recognise it.
Paolo made the most of this feature and, not without facing difficulties,
built his outstanding creature.
It's nice to see we can always get our paradigms blown away to let some
fresh air come in and teach us something new.
Mario
Web page: http://www.geocities.com/~marioferrari
LUGNET member page: http://www.lugnet.com/people/members/?m=22
Proud member of ItLUG: http://www.itlug.org
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