Technobotts

Finals Day 2011-07-10

Well, I don’t know how this has happened, but remarkably, the TechnoBotts are playing in the finals day today. It’s another luck of the draw thing, I suppose, and probably reflects on how well the other teams in our superteam have done. Although our performance this year has been considerably better than last year’s, playing 9 matches and winning 4 of them, we didn’t think we’d done well enough to merit a place in the finals. But at 10:00 we are playing team A.I. on pitch A2.
The boys are readying the robot, and I am preparing to go and stake out a good viewing position by the pitch. I still can’t quite believe we are in a match in the finals – this is amazing!
This first round looks like it’s the semi-finals, as there are 4 superteams involved, with 1 playing 4 and 2 playing 3. We are in the LWS Final 4 superteam, which is playing against the LWS Final 1 superteam – all matches are at 10 a.m. as follows:

Junior party (and we’ll cry if we want to) 2011-07-09

Last night’s Junior Party…
Was a bit of a disappointment, really. After last year’s party in Singapore, with well-organised buses and good food and entertainment and goody bags, we were hoping for a bit more from the party in Turkey than we got.

Competition day 3 2011-07-09

After the loss of our last motor in the last game we played yesterday, we are wondering if we will be able to declare 2 Lego robots this morning, or if we will be forced to play with just one robot, as when the team’s robots were initially registered they comprised 1 new robot and 1 Lego robot.
Andrew has been endeavouring to make the single remaining semi-functional new robot work with just 2 motors rather than 3, but this will compromise its functionality greatly and the best it can really hope to achieve is acting as a semi-mobile impediment to the other team’s robots.

Competition day 2 2011-07-08

We were right to aim to get to the Expo Center early today. Our first match is at 9am. There are also forbidding signs up saying that soccer robots must be inspected BEFORE the match they play in – no sticker, no game. Fair enough. The boys are aware that they need to get the robots weighed in pre-9am match – that was the reason for struggling out of bed so early. We have been drawn to be in a superteam of 3 today, not 2. I see that one of our opponents is HSHB Australia, who we played (and beat) yesterday. We are in superteam 12, consisting of us, FRT-A and A.I. Superteam 12 plays against Superteam 13, which consists of Keepon, Munako-Amateras and HBHS Australia. In round 1, the matches are: 9:00 am – TechnoBotts vs Keepon 10:00 am – FRT-A vs Munako-Amateras 10:30 am – AI vs HBHS Australia I’m guessing that we will play Munako-Amateras in round 2, and HBHS-Australia in round 3. Our chances today depend on 2 things:

Competition day 1 2011-07-07

First day of competition today. Three matches. Up bright and early-ish to get to the Expo Center in time – our first match was not until 10.30 so that gave us some valuable fiddling time in the morning.

Hotel hassles 2011-07-02

Found out last night that the hotel we had originally booked in was over-full due to an administrative error, so we were going to be switched from the original 4* hotel to a 5* hotel with better transportation links to the venue. So I rearranged the airport transfer to get Andrew and I taken to the new hotel and was about to confirm that yes, we could move to that hotel, no problem, when I received another email saying that they were going to switch us to yet another hotel instead.

Progressing well… 2011-06-30

One robot completed today. Hardware finished; some programming still required.

Not long to go… 2011-06-30

…and the robots are showing the pressure.

T-shirts and sponsors 2011-06-24

We are delighted to be able to reveal our t-shirt design, both front and back. The front looks like this:

Bits and pieces 2011-06-18

The postman arrived early this morning, with a cardboard box.

It moves… 2011-06-11

First test drive!

The point of no return 2011-05-28

This week we heard that we will be getting some sponsorship from ARM – for which, many many thanks! – and what with that and the money that we have in so far, we are now approaching half way towards our fund raising target. So it’s time to take a leap of faith and book things (like flights) before the prices rise any further, and keep our fingers crossed that some more money will come in. As of this evening the flights are booked (with complicated travel arrangements given that 2 of us will be travelling out to Turkey from Stansted on 5th July and one of us is visiting CERN in Geneva on that day) and the team is now registered to take part.

Where there’s a wheel, there’s a way… 2011-05-21

Today we got a bit further with the new robot wheels. We’ve been using Singapore School of Robotics omni-wheels so far: These are Lego Mindstorms compatible, and gave us a big advantage over the other UK teams last year. However, compared with the wheels of some of our opponents in Singapore last year, these weren’t quite what we needed, and so Andrew and Eric have come up with an omni-wheel design which uses a split ring (like a large keyring), 32 washers, a custom-machined piece of aluminium and a handful of cable ties.

Starting to assemble the bits… 2011-05-07

Over the last week or so, at TechnoBotts HQ, various packages have been arriving containing bits of the new robots. We now have most of the parts that we need, except for the wheels and the chassis, crucial bits for which will be ordered very soon.

2011 – Turkey or bust. 2011-05-02

At the RoboCup Junior UK final on 19th March, the team did amazingly well, using the 2 Lego robots that we took to Singapore last year. The TechnoBotts were head and shoulders above the opposition, winning each match that they played. The three first-round matches and the semi-final were all 5-0 to the TechnoBotts; these matches were stopped after a 5-goal difference. The Final, against Prenton High School, and which, realistically, looked like they might present a bit of a threat to us as their robots were faster than ours, the TechnoBotts won 8-0.

Day 4 – results and finals 2010-06-24

It wasn’t really a great surprise to find out that we were not in the finals. Our team’s fairly dismal performance assured this. There are a couple of reasons for this – one, that our robot is relatively weak, slow and blind. This we know. This we can improve on for the future.

Day 4 Friendlies 2010-06-24

Day 3 – Match 4 2010-06-24

Our 4th and final match of the day was against Team Fuyong, rather than the rematch against Team Victory which we had been looking forward to. There seemed little point in playing Fuyong again – we had already lost badly to them twice – what was the point of rubbing our noses in it? The way that the tournament is organised is flawed in this respect. If there are 22 teams in a league, it seems positively wrong to have 3 matches against the same team – or 4 matches against the same team, as happened to Team Victory who had been looking forward to playing us again as they had enjoyed our previous close match. Instead they will be playing Team Zero (the one we are paired with in our superteam) for the 4th time and they are not at all happy about it. There were more discussions with the ref and the organisers before we reluctantly went to the pitch to commence our thrashing by our old nemesis, Team Fuyong. The game started with Team Fuyong slamming in a quick first goal using their tried and tested dribble along the back wall and slide it in technique. There was then a scuffle in the right yellow goal corner before they surged forward again to score – twice. The ball was then stuck up at the blue end for a while but Team Fuyong brought it down and slammed in another and another, before the ball was removed to have its batteries changed. The score was now 5-0 to them. The new strategy for the goalie that Eric and Andrew had been working on seemed a bit poor, but it is hard to think of any strategy for a goalie that would work against two such fast, agile and aggressive robots as these. We were seriously outclassed – again. The score rose to 8-0. We had one opportunity to score with a long kick at the goal, but they saved it easily and then scored again and again. 10-0. and then 13-0. The Team Fuyong goalie went into whirly mode – just rotating on the spot very fast – and was taken off the pitch for a minute as a damaged robot. Would we have a chance now, playing against just one robot? The Team Fuyong forward came close to scoring an own goal, and we held our breath for a moment, but then it took the ball down to our goal and our rather random goalie failed to save it. And they popped in a 14th goal moments before the half time whistle. Score at half time – 14-0. At half time Eric and Andrew again attempted to change the goalie’s somewhat random wandering behaviour to slow it down a bit – we’ll see if this makes a difference. The second half continued much as the first half, with Team Fuyong scoring goal after goal after goal. Ten minutes have seldom passed so agonizingly. It would have been nice if our robots had been able to see the ball better, or get to it faster, or even touch it sometimes. Their robot is so fast that at kickoff after a goal, where we start off about 2cm from the ball and they start off 30cm from the ball and both team captains press the robot start button at the same time, their robot gets to the ball before ours does, and we just do not stand a chance. The final score for the match was 29-0 – the first match in which we didn’t score anything. But a pretty predictable result.

Day 3 – Match 3 2010-06-24

There was some heated debate before this match started as to whether we would actually be playing it or not. Our other “superteam” team (today we are in a superteam of 2 teams again, which is a disadvantage) seems to want to play it as well, and are a bit put out that we are assigned to play 5 matches and they are assigned to play 4 out of the 9 posible slots today. But we do need to play this match again against the Dream Team again after the way that the match we had against them before ended. The other superteam team has won so many matches already that they don’t really need the points – they will be into the finals for sure. It’s time for Tairo (the Japanese professor in charge of RCJ soccer) to intervene. He and the boys disappear for a while.

Day 3 – Match 2 2010-06-24

This was our first match against another Lego NXT team, Team Victory, the only US team in RoboCup Junior Soccer. They had 2 rectangular robots with very effective dribblers. We had experimented with dribblers earlier in the season but had not managed to get them working successfully alongside the kicker and chassis design that we had settled on. We also were running into problems with the weight limit for Soccer A Lightweight. They used fewer motors than us, and only 1 NXT brick, which saved a fair bit of weight for them .

Technobotts win Innovative Design Trophy! 2009-04-18

TechnoBotts³ came 4th out of 84 robots in robot performance, so narrowly missed a trophy there (there were trophies for first, second and third, won by Brazil, Singapore and China respectively- no US robots achieved a 400-point run at the FIRST World Festival, but 4 foreign teams did!), BUT we won the 1st place for Innovative Design trophy! So we’re all really thrilled about that.

Second Competition Day 2009-04-17

Today the team had the 3 robot runs in the Georgia Dome. First run – 370 points, which was enough to put us in first place for a while! It was a good feeling seeing Technobotts3 at the very top of the scoreboard.

Practice, and First Competition Day 2009-04-16

After a painfully early start (the team left the hotel at 7.15 am) we walked down to the GWCC to get to the pit area for opening at 8am, picking up some donuts for breakfast on the way.

Arrival in Atlanta 2009-04-14

We’ve arrived in Atlanta. The tournament begins tomorrow.