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Was it last year or the year before that the big competition was the underater
robot which had to navigate thru some sort of course. IIRC, the MIT team came
in first, but their 'bot cost some outrageous amount--and the second place team
used 2 RCX's in their underwater 'bot and was significantly cheaper to boot.
There's probably a thread somewhere here on LUGNET about it...
After reading about these types of competitions, and participating in a few RCX
robot competitions myself, I find it literally amazing what the RCX, as the base
unit, can do. Add all the custom sensors you want, but thinking about it, I
believe with the team of rtl guys we might have managed a 'junkyard wars' 4x4
controlled by an RCX.
That is just my humble opinion.
As an aside, when the ep. of Junkyard wars aired with the guys ripping apart that electric wheelchair to make an RC mini-van, that's basically what showed me that to electronically control a vehicle really ain't that hard. And the electric wheelchair motor controllers could probably interface with the RCX pretty easily (with some stock Radio Shack stuff thrown in :) ) As for the sensors--HiTechnic all the way ;)
As a further aside, when it comes to 'bot building, it's almost an imperative to
subscribe to the KISS theory. Many times there'd be a beautifully wonderfully
intracate 'bot out there in an rtl competition witl loads of b'bells and
whistles... but, as Mr. Scott is fond of saying, the more ye overthink the
plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain...'--the 'bot would fail. But
watch out! Here comes 'simple 'bot' along to win the competition. After
reading a few articles on the 'grande challenge', seems to be the root cause of
most of the failures--overthought and overdone 'bot building.
Eh, I'll never enter so I can't criticize ;)
Dave K
-pretty big subscriber to keepin' it simple
In lugnet.robotics.rcx.nqc, "Elizabeth Mabrey" <emabrey@storming-robots.com>
wrote:
>
>
> > > Yes I know, and I'm also looking how they do (looks like game is over
> > > now, after at most 11 of 229km).
> > > So I was not really serious, but neither was I 100% joking.
> > > There have been serious robot competitions where Mindstorms based
> > > robots have won,
>
> Comparing the sophistication involved in those vehicles and lego mindstorms
> based robots are far stretching. The links you provide are not related to
> lego mindstorms, but they definitely
> do look interesting, of course. Some of the teams at the DARPA challenge
> were led by renowned robotics scientist, such as Dr. Red William Whittaker.
> The computing power of some of
> equipment is superb... Some part of terrain is very very rugged, across
> brushes, steep hills covered with rocks, ridges, feets-deep water, just
> treacherous roads.
>
> --
> E
> >
> > mostly because they were the easiest
> > > to get running, and the others all broke down more or less.
> > > For example
> > >
> > > http://advance.uri.edu/pacer/september2000/story5.htm
> > > http://www.auvsi.org/competitions/2000/photogallery.cfm
> > > http://www.auvsi.org/competitions/2000/pics/URI1.jpg
> > >
> > >
> > > Jürgen
> > >
> > > --
> > > Jürgen Stuber <stuber@loria.fr>
> > > http://www.loria.fr/~stuber/
> > >
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | RE: The grand challenge
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| (...) Comparing the sophistication involved in those vehicles and lego mindstorms based robots are far stretching. The links you provide are not related to lego mindstorms, but they definitely do look interesting, of course. Some of the teams at (...) (20 years ago, 16-Mar-04, to lugnet.robotics.rcx.nqc, lugnet.robotics.rcx)
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