Cool Robot Video

I thought this was a great idea. And it is especially interesting to me because we worked with similar Lego Mindstorms at the University of Washington.

The meat of our project at the UW was to build a robot that could navigate through certain obstacles. Okay, that was fine... But the best part of the project was where we had to battle our robots against the other teams' robots. I can't remember exactly, but I know we did alright on the navigation. For the battling we chose a different tactic than the other teams. Needless to say we creamed them. Most teams used physical means of destroying or debilitating the other robots; we didn't even need to touch them.

The robots themselves send and receive data through an IR port. This is the same as, say, your TV clicker. Usually you would simply use this port to download your programs and such to the device. Instead... And let me give almost all the credit to Steven on this one... We used the IR port to literally stop/turn-off the other team's robot. It worked perfectly, too! While Steven and I both came up with the idea in general, Steven was able to do a ton of research in order to find out exactly what bytes, etc. to send in order to get the other robots to stop.

The best part was that we told absolutely nobody about our plan. The first time we got it to work, we went into the test room and randomly fired off the 'stop' message to other robots. We were holding the robot at the time as well, so that nobody knew that it was us. In the same way that you can use the TV clicker from a distance, we were turning off other robots from a distance. The other teams were so perplexed... "what just happened?", "why did it just turn off?"! We could hardly keep a straight face!

In the obstacle course where we would battle, there was a turn that each robot had to come around in order to get to us. The robot would start to come around... And then stop! Haha... The first time this happened, the crowd of other students (and the other team) just fell silent and was completely disappointed. We then told them what we did and they were very pissed. Haha... I'm sorry, but it was just too awesome.

Anyways... That class at the UW was a really great time and I wish there were more hands on classes like it. Not only did we get to build small robots, we got to build small bridges (of which my teams bridge held the most weight) and some other stuff I can't remember... Oh well. I just really like working in a team to build awesome fun stuff like that.

Later,
Daniel