Lego Robot Challenge

The challenge

As part of the robotics course at the Department of Computer Science, Utrecht University, students, in teams of 3 or 4, must construct a Lego robot and program it (in NQC) to perform a particular task. This years challenge was that the robot had to pick up soda-cans in a square arena and bring them to a particular corner of the arena as fast as possible. The goal of the project is that students will get an insight in the problems involving

• robust robot design
• sensing
• dealing with imprecision

A full description of the challenge you can find here.

The teams

Eight teams participated:

Team 1: Martin Broere, Everine van de Kraats, Jacqueline Pronk, Rick van der Ree.

A description of their robot can be found here (Dutch, word, 380 KB). The code can be found here zip, 10 KB).

Team 2:Walter de Back, Martijn ten Brink, Tijn van der Zant, Lars Zwanepol.

A description of their robot is not available.

Team 3: Hayo Aue, Eelco Dolstra, Stefan Hartsuiker.

A description of their robot can be found here (Dutch, pdf, 300 KB).

Team 4: Jan Dik, Michiel Hildebrand, Derk Pietersen, Jurjen de Vries.

A description of their robot can be found here (Dutch, HTML).

Team 5: Hendrik van Essen, Thomas van Kuipers, Sierk Rosema.

A description of their robot can be found here (Dutch, word, 350 KB).

Team 6:Wouter van Kempen, Zeger Knops, Ronald Loef.

A description of their robot can be found here (Dutch, pdf, 940 KB).

Team 7: Patrick de Groot, Michiel Hermsen, Erwin Jansen, Gert Jan Verhoog.

A description of their robot can be found on their web site. The document can be found here (Dutch, pdf, 180 KB). A little paper about the robot can be found here (English, pdf, 60 KB).

Team 8: Amass El Adouli, Ahmed Amjahid, Eelco Rommers.

A description of their robot can be found here (Dutch, word, 1100 KB).

The results

It turned out that the challenge was rather complicated. On one hand, a complicated design was required to pick up the cans using just one motor (although some teams had very clever solutions here, like dragging the cans, or first pushing them over). On the other hand, finding the cans using the light and touch sensors was difficult. Also teams had problems with the surface (robots react differently on different surfaces).

The winner was Team 5. Their robot managed to return three of the five cans to the starting area, and leave them there. Teams 4 and 6 both managed to return one can. The other teams failed to do so due to many different reasons. You can find some of these reasons in the descriptions (see the links above).

Some more pictures

Pictures 1

Pictures 2

Pictures 3

Pictures 4