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It has to be said (since I had one previous run-in with the legal department of the LEGO company, but that's neither here nor there), that this page is in no way affiliated with the LEGO Company (Canada or otherwise) and is not endorsed by the aforementioned company.
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rtlToronto has robotic competitions every few months. After the fun we had at Guelph with the sumo competition, we wanted to go to another one. Well, rtlToronto provided a block stacking competition. See the official rtlToronto page here.
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| Here's the competition: Grab blocks in the arena and stack them on top of one another. I set out to tackle this challenge. What better place to start than building and programming the 'bot on my picnic table in my back yard. |
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Here's the basic layout of the 'bot. While it changed from here, the changes were mostly cosmetic. The 'bot uses 6 motors: one for each tire (2 per side) and 2 to operate the grabber arm. |
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Some voiced an interest as to the exact mechanical layout of the grabber arm. Here is a 3D rendered version of the actual grabber mechanism. As well, find the .dat file here. |
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The test--on my back porch. |
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The test--in a home-made arena in my basement. |
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Then over to Rick's the night before the competition for some finalizing on the programming. |
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The day of the competition. Some young fans brought their own 'bots--It was great! |
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| The two elevator 'bots, going head to head. |
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| Chris's pneumatic 'bot. A very cool idea. |
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Rick and I put some last minute coding changes into our NQC program. Rick was the primary coder. Well, I wrote code, then I showed up at his place and he reworked the code until it was 4 times bigger and 10 times better. Anyway, see it here. |
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Pictures of the competition |
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There were two LEGO doggies at the gathering. One by Hitoshi Hirota used Servo motors. Jin Sato brought his creations, including a LEGO dog. Very impressive. |
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Here he is, Hitoshi Hirota, working on some code for his robotic arm. He's kinda shy, but my friends and I were much impressed with him and his creations. See his homepage here. |
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Jin Sato also brought his Mindstorms soccer team. The 'bot players are attracted to an infrared transmitter in the soccer ball. Lots of fun. Jin's homepage is here |
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A few more pics of block collecting 'bots. As well, a picture of a wonderfully designed sumo 'bot with a built-in gear shift. |
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I don't know how they did it, but someone convinced Jin and Hitoshi to put their 'bot dogs in a sumo match together. It was fun to watch. |
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| Again, thanks to Joseph Allan for taking the pics. I am sorry that I didn't have alot of time to mingle with everyone at the competition--we were experiencing technical difficulties with our Runamok 'bot and that was taking up most of my time in modifications. |
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