Some highlights of my experience:
* The robot team got owned hard. Didn’t pick up a single object during competition, although it worked pretty well during the last run on the practice field.
* Our ethics competition team took 1st, and a UK student’s paper took 3rd in the student paper competition, so UK’s student branch made out pretty well overall.
* I *can* stay up for 43 hours straight, as long as I get a few quiet minutes to put myself into a meditative state every 8ish.
* Robots can be worked on any time, any where, any state of intoxication (image).
* It is possible for every single sensor mechanism on a robot to fail catastrophically over a span of a few hours.
* It is unwise to have temperamental people working on programming, especially more than one; once that happens no one else can touch the codebase, and huge amounts of time will be wasted on hissyfits.
* It is in fact possible to fabricate a variety of effective sensors from items found at WallMart. Optical mouse bits+ laser pointer bits= optointerrupter. Thick wire + thin wire + suspension = pressure sensor.
* I really enjoy how friendly the competition is. Competing teams share tools and parts and help each other… I think we all sort of regard it as a karmic system.
*This will be updated with a link to pictures/videos which are supposed be posted when they become available, I don’t feel like cleaning and uploading mine separately, and most of the ones I’d like linked are supposed to be handled by others.
Next year’s robot will traverse a course indicated by the same RF fence used this year, on the same astroturf field, with a number of added wood and plexiglass obstacles. The difficulty will come from having to begin the round with no stored energy, and use high intensity lighting on the field to gather power. The organizers are already clever enough to put a “commercially available parts only” rule to keep schools with access to experimental solar panels from employing them, but there are still going to be issues with some schools throwing money at the problem. As much as it is a nifty task about which I have a variety of ideas… I’m not sure that I want to be involved. This year’s robot was, while fun on the technical side, an exercise in frustration mostly due to personalities on the team, and time consuming in the extreme; I’d rather avoid being on the hook for it again. Maybe in an expressly limited advisory role or something, we’re discouraged from having graduate students on the team anyway.
