DMITROBOT - Second Open Robotics Tournament

    You will hardly surprise anyone with robot competitions now: riding, walking, running, crawling, flying and other fighting humanoid pieces of iron have long and actively been competing in a heap of various disciplines - from simple and understandable races to plain fights and all sorts of exotic kinds, such as dances and basketball.
    We (the employees of the Dmitrov branch of Dubna University ) also decided to keep up: this year, the Dmitrobot robot tournament is being held for the second time.

    The format of the tournament is ascetic so far - race along the line, a classic discipline. The age of the participants is different: they are mainly middle-high school students, but students also come across.
    The venue of the tournament this year was Dubna, or rather the sanatorium "Ratmino", located near the city:


    The tournament is only gaining momentum and has a "chamber" character, the geography this year covered Moscow, Dmitrov, Dubna and Yaroslavl; due to the small number of participants, the competition program had to be slightly cut, which gave the following activities in the bottom line:
    1. Excursion to the robotic production;
    2. Lecture on Chebyshev's lambda mechanisms and Chebyshev polynomials;
    3. Free competition of creative models (presentation of robots "on a free topic");
    4. Well, finally, the race!

    First things first.

    Robot manufacturing excursion


    After registration and announcement of the regulations, the participants were taken on a tour of the workshops of the enterprise VNITEP - a manufacturer of laser metal cutting machines.


    Well, what can I say: citizens understand a lot about heavy metal better than many. Manufacturing equipment is my respect. A lecture on the industrial use of robots is especially intelligible at a time when these same robots cut, drill, turn a piece of steel at a quarter ton weight. You also begin to glance at your "home" robots with respectful apprehension: it’s Avon, which, it turns out, can do it in principle!




    Lecture on Chebyshev's lambda mechanisms and Chebyshev polynomials


    Returning from the tour, the participants listened to a lecture about the life and work of one of the most serious Russian mathematicians - Pafnuti Lvovich Chebyshev . Well, Chebyshev integrals must have hiccuped in many readers in the second semester of matanalysis, many with this phrase still tremble. And those who survived the integrals probably still stir within the vague horror at the memory of the Cherbyshev polynomials (this is already in the course of mathematical modeling or numerical methods, or whoever had it). About all these wonderful things in the lecture and told.


    But, as they say, mathematics only becomes material and visible when embodied in machines. An excellent illustration of this thesis are lambda mechanisms. And, perhaps, the most amazing of all the implementations of Chebyshev’s relevant ideas is the stop-walking machine - that’s paropunk as it is!

    Free contest of creative models


    Free competition is free competition. Show what you want, tell what you can! Four models were presented this time.
    The first is a robot, selected from the maze according to the "rule of the right hand." An ultrasonic sensor detects the distance to the most distant wall and drags the robot there. The author is a student of the 8th grade.


    The second model is a robot collecting a pyramid of cubes. The authors have completed the 7th and 8th grades.


    The third model - the most serious one - is a robot that forms a map of the surrounding space using laser triangulation (the author is a graduate student from Yaroslavl).


    And the fourth model is a robot for racing with wheels driven by separate servomotors (the author is a 3rd year student at Dmitrov College).


    Race


    At the end of the presentation of the models, in fact, the race began. There were four participants (in the sense of robots).
    Reaper (Dmitrov):


    Researcher (Dmitrov):


    Crawler (Dubna):


    R2 (Moscow):


    As a result of the races, the Reaper won by a noticeable margin, using servomotors to correct the course.


    As a result, the participants received prizes (books kindly provided for this purpose by the Dynasty Foundation), and the organizers received a lot of fun and a strong confidence to repeat everything next year, but on a much larger scale.
    In general, buy our elephants! I mean, if anyone is interested in the topic of robotic races - come to us in a year on Dmitrobot-3!

    The article is a stripped-down version of the original. (where there are more pictures), everything is published with the consent of the author in order to popularize the competition and attract new robot builders.

    Also popular now: