11 Apr 2011
national-robotics-week
Day 2 of National Robotics Week is over for me. I hit the Trinity Fire Fighting Contest
again this afternoon before continuing on to Boston. The guys from down at Shepard
University managed a third place in the Senior division, a real improvement of where
they were just two weeks ago at the ShepRobo fest. Congrats guys! We also got
Seth's mech walking.
I've now made it to Boston for the TePRA conference. Interestingly, they are apparently
shutting off power to the hotel in a few hours.... although it is supposed to be back
in the morning. Upside: I got a free flashlight. Yay.
In other robot news, the BSA has announced the
official requirements
for the long awaited Robotics merit badge.
10 Apr 2011
national-robotics-week
trinity-fire-fighting
robots
It's National Robotics Week!
Today I ventured down to the Trinity Fire Fighting Home Robot Contest at Trinity College
in Hartford CT. This is like the 17th or 18th contest (they've actually stopped naming
them as such.. I think I won the 15th with Crater though...). There are two main contests:
the Fire Fighting contest in which robots autonomously navigate an 8x8' maze that is laid
out like a small house and put out a fire (candle), and a new RoboWaiter contest where
robots have to fetch a small plate and move it to a table in a similarly sized arena. It
seems that the RoboWaiter contest is finally catching on, as they had about 20 entries
this year.
Maxwell also made the trip, and moved around a few chess pieces in between lots of
question answering about ROS and developing larger mobile manipulators:
Seth (sthmck over at TRC) is pretending to be diligently at work on his mech in the above photo. Earlier in the day the Mech got an upgrade to a new ArbotiX2 prototype:
I actually spent so much time talking to people, I forgot to walk around and get many photos
of the actual fire fighting robots... but I did snap a shot of this bot from NYU-Poly which
has a very western-shoot-em-up-fire-fighter look going on:
Finally, as I packed Maxwell up for transit to California, I snapped a few photos of his new
foam inserts, and how nicely he is tucked into the Pelican case:
On top of the arm/neck/riser layer of foam is a nearly full sheet which supports the mobile base
and holds the Kinect in place:
Maxwell won't be making the trip back down tomorrow, he's packed and ready to go to the Robot Block Party and RoboGames.
07 Apr 2011
national-robotics-week
Next week is
National Robotics Week and is
going to be quite a busy week for me. Maxwell will actually be touring the country for NRW this
year, making appearances at the following events:
Additionally, I'll be presenting a paper on a separate topic at the IEEE TePRA conference on Monday
and Tuesday the 11th/12th, while Maxwell is in transit across the country.
I'll be trying to upload photos/recap as the week progresses.