This post talks about Competitive Robotics, and the various competitions held around robotics. Most of the information in this post is an accumulation of all the ideas I had from my college technical fest, Advitiya held in the span of previous 3 days!
Competitive Robotics
Competition according to Wikipedia refers to a situation whenever at least two parties strive for a goal which cannot be shared: where one’s gain is the other’s loss. Competing for being the best robot is what is called a Robot Competition. Robot competitions are a great way to learn about the practical aspects of Robotics(Engineering in general), where research, simulation and execution have to be done in a given deadline.
Advitiya IIT Ropar
Advitiya is the techical fest organized by my college IIT Ropar. Following are the events, held during the fest and my learnings from organizing some of these events!
Henchmen
Henchmen is a line follower robot competition, where we have to design an autonomous robot which follows either a black line in white area or white line in black area. Robot must be able to detect a particular line and keep following it. To make the competition tougher, the lines can form a maze, which the robot must solve. Another complication we can add is to add obstacles, diversions in the path, discontinuities in the path. Designing the most appropriate algorithm for following line is the winning strategy behind this competition.
RoboSoccer
Playing the old soccer game, with autonomous or manually controlled robots is the RoboSoccer competition. Control, Sturdy Body and Proper Connections and Part Selection are what makes the best robot for this event!
Fury Road
An obstacle filled robot car race is the Fury Road event. The robot which takes the minimum time to complete the path is declared the winner. Building a sturdy robot body and controlling it efficiently are the skills required for a contestant to perform well in this event.
Micromouse
This event was originally started by IEEE in the late 1970s. The maze is made up of 16x16 grid of cells, with walls in between the path. The mice are completely autonomous robots that must find their way from a predetermined starting position to the central area of the maze unaided. After navigating it’s path, through the maze a couple of times, the mouse that takes the shortest possible time to complete the run, is declared the winner.
CozmoClench
CozmoClench competition involves building a gripper based robot, and using it to pick and place objects in a specified area on the map. The robot can be manual controlled or autonomous.
Offroad Asphault
An offroad race, where small RC cars compete against each other. It was really interesting to see a miniaturized version of a Formula1 Car, fitted with internal combustion engines, suspensions, proper steering etc.
Conclusion
These were some of the events, that I really liked. But there are still more remaining, like the quadcopter design, CADathon and Hackathon. The teams that won the events, were the ones that had been participating in these events for almost 4-5 years. This was the best lesson learnt in the span of 3 days!
In order to become better at any thing, be it sports, competitions, skills, we need to work on it consistently. Little by little each day. We would certainly experience failures in the beginning but it would reap the benefits at a later stage.
Also, only working hard would not get the required results. A constant feedback loop; improving from mistakes, losing and facing dissappointments are the ingredients that go in as well!