LEGO MINDSTORMS COMPETITION

Can Robots Mindstorm?

Challenge your creativity with LEGO Mindstorms!

Team no. 1

Who we are?

Who we are? (2)

Vesna Jovanovic: Architecture, University of Belgrade, Serbia.

Sébastien Malengreaux: Chemical Engineering, Ghent University, Belgium.

Aurélien Soulet: Mechanical and Civil Engineering at ENSAM, Bordeaux, France.

Pedro Vitória: Mathematics,Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal.

Alina Manolache: Software Engineering in “Politehnica” University of Timisoara, Romania.

What do we do here?

Learning about robotics Programming a TriBot “Playing” with LEGO Getting to know each other Having fun together Finding out more about Danish culture Winning this competition

Competition = ?

Friday, 15th August 2008

Technical University of Denmark

LEGO Mindstorms

25 European students

6 teams

5 assignments

1 winner

Our TriBot: Ball-E

BALL-E = Ball Allocation Load Lifter - Earth Class

BALL-E is a flexible and fast 3-wheeled driving robot.

It takes advantage of all four sensors (light, sound, ultrasonic and touch) to do the job you program it to do.

His brother: Wall-E

WALL-E = Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class.

Movie star in the newest computer-animated science fiction film produced by Pixar Animation Studios.

The film is directed by Andrew Stanton and was released the 29th of June.

Competition assignment 1:Find and measure distance to box

The robot should start at ’Start’, go to the box and show the measured distance L in the display.

The distance is known to be between 2 and 3 meters.

Find and measure distance to box- solution -

The robot moves forward until it reaches the curve. Then it leaves the black line and goes further until it’s in the corner of the curve.

Then it turns 90° to the right and moves forward, following the black line, until the bumper hits the box.

The distance L is displayed on the screen. Because LEGO doesn’t support floating points, we used

another scale.

Competition assignment 2:Open door and go into garage

The robot should start at ’Start’, open the door until it crosses the black line and then enter the garage and stay there.

Open door and go into garage- solution -

The robot moves forward until the touch sensor hits the door of the garage.

It turns 3 times 90° and moves forward until it hits the side of the garage.

It turns 90° to the right, goes forward at full power to hit the garage door for opening it.

Then it turns into the garage box and pushes the door further, so that it crosses the black line.

When the robot reaches the black line it turns, moves into the garage and stops.

Competition assignment 3:The pushbox obstacle

The robot should start at ’Start’, then he must push away the cardboard box and go through the two sidegates.

The pushbox obstacle- solution -

The robot moves forward until it hits the box. In fact it can start from any position.

Then it pushes the box. It turns 90°, moves backwards for a certain number

of seconds and passes through the right gate. Then it stops and moves forward through the

second gate.

Competition assignment 4:The golf course

The robot must start at ’Start’ and push the blue balls past the upper line and the orange ball past the lower line.

The golf course- solution -

When the robot reaches a ball it grabs it.

The robot is able to detect the color of the ball with the light sensor.

Depending on the color of the ball the robot turns left or right and drops the ball.

Then it returns to the line to grab the remaining balls.

When there are no more balls it stops.

Competition assignment 5:The odometry test

Two runs must be done, one clockwise and the other counter clockwise.

The resulting error is the sum of the two errors.

The robot must start at ’Start’ and go one time around the wooden cylinders and back to the starting point. The error is the distance between the starting and ending point.

The odometry test- solution -

First the robot goes clockwise around the wooden cylinders.

It turns slowly and moves fast.

Then it stops for 2 minutes before doing the same on counter clockwise.

Because of some problems with the tracking wheel, the error may vary on every try.

Conclusions

This week we got the chance to be part of big team, formed of 25 engineering students from all over Europe. We lived a unique experience, different from day-to-day school life.

Every morning we attended interesting lectures covering many different aspects of robotics and automation and every afternoon we were solving practical tasks in the laboratory.

We challenged our creativity and improved our team-working skills and finally managed to finish all the five competition tasks.

Thanks to…

BEST Copenhagen for making this event possible, for giving us the opportunity to work in an international environment and having tons of fun.

The professors from Danish Technical University (Luis Sanchez, Nils Andersen and Ole Ravn), who teached us a lot about the fascinating world of robotics.

LEGO® MINDSTORMS® for their support.

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