The Robot

This past weekend was the regional robot competition at Williams Arena in MSP. The kids had a day to prep/repair the robot and then 2 days of competition. I was unable to make the first day but got to be part of the team on Friday and Saturday.

A few days before the robot had to ship there was an accident which resulted in a disabled computer. Unfortunately this is the key to everything. Mr. Doty , the man in charge, was able to order up a new one but the team had to spend the first day and a half getting the computer updated and reloaded.

The pit area

Once we were up and running the kids got excited. The other down side to no computer was the lack of practice. I gaurantee that each one of these kids could knock your socks off in Mario Kart but none of them are old enough to drive. None of them have any sense of what "real" actually is... So, at the end of day 1 competition, Bloomington sits in dead last...

Repair work. The game turns into bumper cars quite frequently.

Saturday turned out to be much better. There was a preliminary's session all morning then finals in the afternoon. The team quickly moved up the charts, jumping 10 other teams before noon. Unfortunately we weren't selected for the finals but the kids were pretty upbeat about moving up the ranks.

Chuck Norris Sharpie Beard?

There were some interesting characters at this place. I should have gotten more pics. The other thing was the amount of money that some of these teams had. It's about $5000 to get into this competition and you could probably expect to spend another $5000 on travel, parts, etc. Some of these teams were completely decked out and you could tell who had some good backing.

These guys were unstoppable in there crowns and capes.

Robotics Warm-UP

Couple weekends ago my company, EAC, hosted a workshop to get the robotics teams warmed up and familiar with CAD. There was a handful of folks from EAC as well as a couple from PTC who makes the CAD software.

NERDS!!!!!

There were several teams there, mostly from Minnesota, however a few teams from North Dakota and Wisconsin made an appearance.

The workshop gave the kids an opportunity to get familiar with Pro/Engineer and ask all the questions they wanted to us "experts". Unfortunately nobody from my squad showed up but it was still good to get a taste of how this was going to work.

Most of them were there for the free pizza and cookies...

A little nerdy...

The company I work for and the company we sell software for are partnering up with First Robotics (website), a youth robotics competition that starts with legos for the real youngins and then gets up to full blown robot projects. The goal being get kids involved in math and science to later become engineers and take over the world.

Each year they announce a game for the competition whether its "beat the crap out of the other robot" or "dunk a ball on the other robot". Each of the upper level teams are given a kit of parts and they go at it. I am hoping to volunteer at the local high school when they announce the game in January. We will probably come up with something like this... I'll keep you updated.

I know that there will be some struggles with programming the bot, does anyone have experience or a good source we can hit up?!? Let me know! Thanks!!!!