Budapest Robotics Tournament Information

Hi roboticists, 

We are excited to participate in our first competition of the year at Fazekas High School next weekend.

Please be at the location on the map (below) at 9:00 on Saturday, November 24.  We will meet inside the school. Ask the receptionist where to go. It's upstairs.

The competition will last into the afternoon and there is not an exact ending time. Last year it went until about 4 PM. If you bring your cell phone, then you can call your parents to give them a better idea of when to pick you up.

The lunch provided may not be to your liking so bring a bag lunch, some snacks to keep you going, and drinking water.

If you have any questions at all please let one of us know.

Thanks,

Mr. Farren and Mr. Scanga

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Simple Machine Ideas To Consider

This video demonstrates a few different principles that might come in handy in competition:

1. Gearing down - getting an advantage of force (in this case torque) or distance (in this case speed) 
2. Transferring motion in another direction - getting something to turn on a different way other than the one that is turning

Pay attention to the ideas of a "gain in force" and a "gain in distance."  

How could we use this in our challenges?

Biology and Robotics

Last meeting we talked a little about how biology is being used as a model for building robots. If you think about it, the designs found in nature have been around for millions and billions of years and they are pretty good. In nature, if a design is not working well (often because the environment changes) then that design goes out of production (becomes extinct). What we see in nature today is pretty amazing from a design and technology standpoint. We are only now starting to consider nature's designs as something we should be trying to copy. Check out the videos below to see some good examples of design inspired by nature.




Design inspired by nature

Getting Started

Once you have completed your robot design (chassis) you need to start looking at the missions and creating some programs.

Here are some good tutorials: http://www.stemcentric.com/nxt-tutorial/

These two videos will also help us get started with programming the NXT:

Meeting One Review:

We watched the video below and talked about gearing down.

We handed out this letter which needs to be completed and handed back to Mr. Lavoie.

Good job in almost completing the construction of all the tournament pieces.

In Comments below, tell us what you learned from the mini-lesson about gearing down. Why would anyone want to do this?

First Lego League Challenge for 2012

Take a  look at this year's mission. It's called Senior Solutions. Please watch the video by the first official full meeting--not the lunch meeting. Of course, you can watch it earlier if you want.

In comments, provide links to other good videos and resources which may be of help as we start thinking about how we will design our robots to compete in this year's challenge.

The official web page with detailed instructions for this mission can be found here.

 Please fill out this form and bring it to Mr. F or Mr. S. 

 Copy of Overview Letter handed out at first meeting here.

Build Instructions for Challenge Table here.

Thanks, and welcome to MS Robotics!