January Challenge on Sunday 28, 2024

UPDATE: Location changed to Tom’s house in Peoria, IL. If you would like to attend, email president@circpeoria.org.

ORIGINAL: We will be hosting a Challenge on Sunday, January 28th. A Challenge is an informal competition and Build Session all in one. We’ll be competing against each other in an informal manner, working on our bots, and collaborating. One can think of it as a day to build robots and see how well they work. The events we’ll be focusing on this time are Line Follow, Line Maze, Mini Sumo, Cone Stalking, and Drone Racing. Registration is not required. There are no prizes. Anyone is welcome to attend. You can bring a hobby bot or not. Questions are welcomed. We’ll start at 10 AM and stop sometime in the late afternoon. There is no schedule of events. Note: If you have some other bot you want to bring, work on, test, or talk about, then bring it with you. We don’t mind being distracted. If you have questions, contact president@circpeoria.org

SUMMARY: The first Challenge & Build Session went well. We dusted off some of our bots that had not been used in a while, sometimes years, and set to figuring out their needs and capabilities. More than one battery was found to be corroded and all hope those bots are not destroyed. We had some very casual contests and discussed methods to make improvements. In between these Challenges, much building and testing went on with the sharing of expertise.

Line Follow – Mike, Matt and Bruce were able to get their line followers functioning. Bruce had installed faster motors in his Zumo and was able to produce times that were about half of its previous times. This time, about 12 seconds, was close to Matt’s time with his 3pi. Mike’s self made bot was faster than both by about 5 seconds. We didn’t worry about exact times.
Line Maze – Matt’s 3pi was able to solve the Line Maze course in a admirable manner, though we did not time it. The struggle for the bot was finding nodes that were not there. We weren’t sure what was causing this, but guessed that it was seeing lines on the course laying under the mat or was thrown off by ripples in the course surface. After removing perceived problems, the bot completed the course.
Cone Stalker – Matt and Karl were able to get their bots to touch the 3 cones. Both bots were given the way points and moved to the cones following a self derived course that avoided cardboard boxes used as obstacles.
Robomagellan – Davide brought the club Robomagellan bot, Wheel-E, and shared his understanding and plans for the lovable bot. After having it for only a couple of weeks, his model in Gazebo is nearly ready to test the operating system. Karl was able to spend a lot of time with Davide to explain different details of the Wheel-E operating system.

Central Illinois Robotics Club

January Challenge on Sunday 28, 2024

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