The start of a new year marks the start of a new season for the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC). FRC is a robot competition for High School students. Each year there is a new game, where the students try to create a robot that will hopefully win. They’re given SIX weeks to create a 120 pound robot. Teams then travel to regionals to compete with other teams. The idea of this program is to get students excited about robotics, science, technology, etc.

Kickoff can be celebrated in numerous ways. FIRST Quebec teamed up with Bombardier to make this kickoff AMAZING. We had an extensive tour of the Bombardier facility, where we were able to see the insides of the best Winter Olympic torch ever, as well as how planes were made. It was amazing to see how small planes are part by part, but when you put them all together they become massive! They also had these HUGE CNC machines. So huge, you could CNC a house and live in it!

The students were really interested in everything as well as the mentors. There was just so much to learn and take in!

Another awesome were the two industrial robots that were doing some work together. It doesn’t seem complex at first, right? You have to account for the tiny inconsistencies of each robot, how the material is moving, and how each robot is moving. I would love to see the code for the dynamic kinematic control. Accounting for every single degree of freedom is crazy!

Here is some video footage that I took, to share the awesomeness:

Here’s Bombardier’s official footage:

Here’s a fellow mentor’s iMovie ’11 trailer:

What do you think about it!? Pretty amazing, right! The whole experience for the students was so much more valuable than watching the webcast for 4 hours. They were asking questions, and seeing that there were actually “pit-like” stations at each of the departments. Lots of tools.

The FIRST Quebec program is run by another program called Youth Fusion. It’s really cool. Here’s a video of the FIRST Quebec teams in action:

All in all, it was an amazing day. I have been mentoring FIRST for 3 years now, and this year is going to be a blast. I’m mentoring a group of programmers to program the robot in Java. It is great to have a group of students that are eager to learn programming!

Good luck teams!

Here are the two things that I have recently finished writing:
- Awesome Foundation Grant
- Research Abstract

Here are the two things that I need to finish:
- Math presentation
- Final research paper

WOOAH! You know, I think this is sort of the tragic downfall of research. You finish researching feeling like you saved the world (because you did), and now you have to go write so many things that eventually all the words start to sound the same, but if you place them in a different order they have a different meaning.

Here is what I wrote for the Awesome Foundation. It is extremely long (almost 500 words), but I believe my imaginative intro captures some attention. I was trying to go JKR style with Quidditch

In a jolt of electricity, two robots collide in maddening competition to score the game winning
goal. Their batteries are weak, their artificial intelligence is exhausted. Beading with
condensation from the overheating servos, the crowd roars in excitement. Robot #85 from the
Rusty Roboteers dodges the defense and swiftly uses its reinforced learning to predict where the
goalie will be, and SCORES the game winning goal! The 2028 National Robot Hockey League
is won by the Rusty Roboteers for the third straight year.
Taking a step back to the present, the only competitive sport that humanoids participate in is
soccer. Soccer, to some, is an endearing sport full of strategy. To others, it is a game that requires
too much waiting.

What if they could play hockey?

Currently, I am an upcoming freshman majoring in Computer Science at Clarkson University.
My passion is making robots do things that they normally wouldn’t. In particular, I have a
humanoid robot called MANOI that is able to play hockey.

Currently, it has a hockey stick that can detect a puck in front of it, and its ‘skates’ are made out
of lego. It can skate forwards, backwards, left and right.

However, MANOI does not gracefully stride across the ice to score a goal. Instead, it jerkily
moves its leg as it cannot take the risk of falling over, as it has no sensors to sense it if it is
falling or not.

This is a problem because I cannot advance any further with the current supplies. It is easy to
foresee that one day, MANOI will be able to skate graciously. In order to reach this goal, it needs
some additional supplies to be able to do so.

For instance, if I am fortunate enough to win this $1000, I could buy some servos to allow
MANOI to have extra degrees of freedom to move its legs more and take strides. Additionally, I
could add wrists to MANOI to add some flick shots! Many precise gyro sensors could be
purchased to monitor the key servos and employ reinforcement learning to make the skating
motions more optimal for speed, strength, and stability.

When MANOI is able to skate graciously, it will be truly awesome because it would mean that
robots have reached another stage of mobility. At that stage, ultimately, the possibilities of this
are endless.

One of my grand visions is an inspirational exhibit during an NHL game where miniature hockey
robots would be skating around and playing a game, autonomously. The goal would be to inspire
young hockey fans to pursue an education in science, while excelling at sports.

By inspiring the younger generation, we can ensure that more awesomeness will follow in the
years to come, and keep the cycle of inspiration flowing!

I hope it is awesome enough to catch some attention, and maybe even win! The cool thing about this is that I am happy with what I wrote. When I was writing my abstract, it was important to realize, and make others realize, that it really doesn’t matter if it is 100%. If the person writing it is happy with it, then it will go a longer way than if it is 100%.

I must return to more intense finger poking, but I am planning to take a MAKEation for the first three weeks in August! It would be neat to set a goal of blogging every day.

I’m happy that I got super shipping… I don’t think I would have received it in time otherwise!

See:

It even comes with bubble wrap! ^_^

Let’s get started

The board is really shiny, but it is more of an orangey-red than a red-red. However, it is really catchy. Too bad in the end it is covered by all the components though!

See, look how giant the chip is! Sweet!

It’s time to solder. This is the cleanest the soldering iron has been in a few weeks

The SANGUINO silkscreen is easily covered by the DIP…

These capacitors remind me of balloons hehe

It doesn’t have a chip on its shoulder… yet (get it? the 648P isn’t in yet hahaha)

This part was sooo confusing. The instructions said… “Insert the LED on the flat side of the board” or something like that. Flat side? I never knew that there was a non-flat side… BAHA!

If the red LED is not entered correctly, nothing will work…

The proper way to insert the LEDs is… negative, positive and negative, positive. It clearly didn’t say that on my silkscreen >_> At least I only got one of them wrong

Sooo, after cleaning that LED up… it works! YAY!

The software was aggravating to get working, but I did manage to get it to work in the end. I’ll post up my version of the Arduino 12 IDE for Sanguino tomorrow, or something.

The number of outputs and inputs is so astonishing! It even has two TX/RX ports. I’ll probably finish off MANOI and Snowplow robot tomorrow, and think of a way to use the Sanguino in MANOI!

It would be cool to have an IR sensor right now for MANOI, so I could mount it on its stick, but instead I may try two LDRs with LEDs. I have the supplies for that, so I can easily implement a Bayes Filter algorithm to determine if the ball is there or not.

The Bayes Filter algorithm is a form of AI. I’ve been working on a tutorial about the BFA for uCHobby.com for a very long time. (TeX takes a long time to type).

Swweeeet!!!!

The last place I went to while in California was the JPL! It was really amazing! Our tourer works on Deep Space. Uber cool!

Click continue reading to see the pics

That’s all the pictures I took! It was so amazing there. I’m not exactly sure what my favourite parts were… probably seeing the giant MSL banner, seeing a model of a MER and seeing the test site of a MER, watching people in their bunny suits, and just taking it all in! Hopefully one day I will be able to go back there…

Back to reality, the past three days I’ve been completing the BubbleBoy robot. It looks really characterful! (the word characterful is a code word for the people who know about a certain contest that is really cool to give them a sneak taste )