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Lego Sumo Practice Session. 21 Jan 2009 |
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Written by RichardJones
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Sunday, 25 January 2009 |
Nine people attended. We started a little late as the Seminar Room door was locked and although I had access to the corridor we could not get into the main room. The nice security guy turned up at about 6.35 and we went in.
Stuart, William, Scot and Tiffany brought along their NXT creation subsequently named Topple. Topple is a first generation Lego Sumo bot that had not seen active service or even a Sumo ring until the evening. Of course thats what the practice session was all about. Topple had a tendency to advance to the edge of the ring and fall off as it tried to reverse to the centre. Its a nice little twist raising the ring a few cm off the floor! When spinning on the spot looking for prey Topple had a tendency to scratch circles in the black paint of the sumo ring. Some quick rebuilding to add a caster, modify the centre of gravity and new software reduced the wear on the once new sumo ring and battle commenced. To be fair Topple was up against Gnasher, a second generation bot with many incremental improvements along the way, so Topple retired having fought bravely but not very successfully.
Vilna had some interesting observations. We started the bots back to back as shown in the lego video, and our New Year video here: http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~rjtp/LegoSumo/RobotSumo.mov At Burnside High they built sumo bots a year or two back and the bots had difficulty finding each other when the target bot was at an angle providing little reflected ultrasound signal back to the sensor. So we set Gnasher off at an angle to the opposing bot. Gnasher immediately fell off the ring, and subsequently did not find Topple at a 45 degree angle. So there might be some improvement opportunities here. Improved search algorithms for finding bots a awkward angles, stealth bots that are hard to find, and more sensors to reduce incidence of topple.
Sue Linscot from http://www.robokits.co.nz/ brought along a tracked robot kit and which she assembled during the evening with a lot of 'help' from William and Scot. Sue decided not to enter the Sumo as the tracked bot did look small and sophisticated next to the brutish Lego bots. Maybe we should have a lightweight class just to keep things fair.
By 8pm battle was all done and it was bedtime for some of us. Sorry to those who could not make it earlier and found us gone.
Our next session is on Wed 18th Feb 2009 at 6.30pm in the Science Alive Seminar Room. Topics will be the Robo Sumo Challenge, anything else that people choose to bring along and hopefully plenty of interesting items for the free stuff table. See http://kiwibots.org for directions.
Richard Jones
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 25 January 2009 )
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