Posts Tagged robotics

The football is in the air

Posted by Utkarsh in Weblog on May 30, 2010

People are waiting for some great football. Here’s a collection of football videos of a different kind. Robots playing against each other. Coming up with effective passes on their own. And they play quite good. At least the ones that have been programmed by pros.

How do these robots work? There’s a camera at the top of the “field”. This camera is connected to a computer. The marks on top of the robots help identify a computer where each robot is. Based on this, a strategy is developed and sent out wirelessly to the robots (bluetooth, FM, wifi, etc).

These competitions are conducted by FIRA, or the Federation of International Robot-soccer Association. Their aim is to promote research, so that a machine team can win against a human team.

football, robotics, technology

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RobotiQ at Quark 2010

Posted by Utkarsh in Weblog on January 19, 2010

Quark 2010 is BITS Pilani’s Innovation Festival with competitions spanning technically inclined challenges, the humanities and the sciences as well. And robotics is an integral part for engineering perfection, right from the undergrad level.

Quark this year has 3 robotics events. Each one covering a different aspect of robotics, engineering, electronics and computer algorithms. And with almost a fortnight to go, it is the right time to start building your bots!

King of the Ring

Ever watched Robowars on television? Loved those weapons and all that agility? This event combines that with the world famous Sumo bot event. Create a manually controlled robot with weapons. Chainsaw? Flamethrowers (with deo maybe)? Hammers? You name it! But you cannot damage the other person’s wires. Just get it out of the arena somehow.

Mission Salvation

Here’s the thing: make a micromouse. That is, create an autonomous robot that can traverse a maze and reach its center in as little time as possible. Oh, and when you reach the center, you’ll save the only surviving humans… thus protecting the entire human race from extincion!

3 Ball Pool

Create a pool playing bot. Not in the literal sense. But, a bot that places colored blocks in the correct pocket using an overhead camera. And you get a lot of bonus points if you can “pot the balls” in the sequence we give you on the spot! Enjoy!

If you relish in technical challenges that combine a lot of different branches of engineering, go ahead and register right now. Oh, and I forgot to mention… prizes worth Rs. 60,000 to be won! You can get detailed event descriptions and rules over here: http://bits-quark.org/robotiq

Need help? Contact me or drop a comment over here… I’ll get back to you as soon as possible

If your college hasn’t received an invitation from us, please contact:

Hanu Prateek
Quark Coordinator
Department of Publicity and Public Relations
Mobile: +91 98238 14138
Email: hanuprateek@bits-quark.org

Update: I’ve uploaded pictures of Quark 2010.

challenge, quark, robotics, Technical

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Teaching robotics in class!!!

Posted by Utkarsh in Weblog, Work on January 15, 2010

The Electronics & Robotics Club at BITS-Pilani, Goa took up an initiative to teach people about image processing based robots and competitions. This was one area of robotics where the campus wasn’t up to the mark (relatively… compared to the mechanical and microcontroller based robots).

This was partially because of way expensive workshops by professionals. Would you pay Rs. 4,000 (per person, for a team of 4) to learn image processing and building robots that use image processing. I don’t think so. Thus the initiative.

We came up with a custom workshop, named the RoboCV workshop. Complete with lectures and a give away kit. We surveyed various online shops and figured out who was selling individual parts the cheapest. So batteries were from ThinkLabs while the motors were from Visha Electronics, and so on. And thus the kit was mixed and matched for optimal price.

And it cost around Rs. 800 (per person) for a team of 4. Compare this with Rs. 4,000/person (for a team of 4). HUGE difference

And the lectures were to be given by us… so they were free The lectures have been going on for the past four days. They’ve been great. We’ve covered these topics in detail: image processing concepts, electronics, and coding in Matlab & OpenCV.

I think we’ve had more than 20 hours of lectures+”practicals” till now. And one session still remains. They’ve been given time till Monday to write code about what they’ve learned. And then they’ll test their code on an arena and we’ll guide them about where there can be improvements, etc.

It seems we’ve motivated quite a lot of people to work on IP robotics! I hope other clubs also follow us and get into the teaching aspect as deep as we did

PS: I’ll be uploading the slides on my website, just in case you’re interested

I’ve put up the entire set of slides. You can download the slides! Leave me a comment/contact me if you find these helpful