Robogames 2006
Three days of Robogames were in San Francisco’s Fort Mason this weekend.
My interest was in autonomous sumo robot competition.
Robot sumo is played on round black steel plate. Edges are marked white so robots can detect boundaries. The goal is to make a robot that would detect the opponent and push him out of the ring. Robots are autonomous so there is no radio control. There are several categories : 25g nano, 100g micro, 500g mini, 3kg, LEGO ..etc.
In both 500g and 3kg categories, Singapore’s Ngee Ann Polytechnic won all first three places.
What I could see, for all their design they used Microchip dsPIC microcontrollers and 10-20 Sharp infrarred proximity sensors pointing in all directions. They also used, what I didn’t know was legal, magnets underneath their robots to increase traction. They were fast and pushed their oponents from the rink with ease.
Category: Electronics, Robots 2 comments »
June 21st, 2006 at 11:32 am
The Ngee Ann Polytechnic folks are really good. The school has an excellent program and has promoted robotics for many, many years. They regularly travel up here to Tokyo to compete in the robot sumo (open category) events and the Micromouse competitions. During the Micromouse finals last Fall they took all three top prizes against some really tough Japanese competitors.
They haven’t done quite as well in Robot Sumo, but they still give the Japanese a run for their money. Of course it’s really hard to beat the Japanese at robot sumo since the competitions have been held here for the past 18 years. If you’re interested, there are quite a few videos I’ve taken at the competitions on my Robots Dreams weblog.
June 21st, 2006 at 11:29 pm
Thanks for pointing me to Robo Dreams.
Also, I have two silent videos from Robogames sumo competition:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lriombH1Tw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpqmBEG349I