How we managed to win Eurobot

On 18th April, we won UK finals of robotic contest Eurobot. In every round, two teams compete against each other on a playing table where they accomplish various tasks that gain points. Two autonomous robots are allowed per team and no human interaction during the competition is permitted. This is for introduction, but now let’s rewind and see how it all began.

We already tried to compete in Eurobot last year, but we did not manage to pass homologation. This was due to various reasons including bad management and no knowledge transfer within our RoboSoc society. We learnt from this and worked hard to make sure that we prevented this happening again in the future.

In RoboSoc, we introduced tutorials and workshops for freshers. During these weekly sessions, we were teaching students how to design, build and programme robots. At the end of first semester, we organised a robot race with robots that freshers built. These were Bluetooth controlled from a smartphone.

Work on Eurobot robots commenced after Christmas, so we had less than half the time we had the year before. The key was to invent the simplest possible solution for the competition challenges while maintaining high reliability. We also split up both robots into several independently testable systems. These were, for example, gear, launching mechanism and ball storage space. After we had a concept that could work, we all sat down and discussed the idea trying to further simplify it. Next, we designed the system on a PC and reviewed it again. We took the manufactured prototype and tested it on the playing table. This was merely perfect, so after identifying ways how to improve it, we repeated the whole process until we had a working system. At the end, we put all these systems together to build the robot and tested it again to identify flaws and improvements.

Considering that most of the team consisted of mainly freshers, we went simple in terms of programming too. Instead of using Raspberry Pi with ROS like the year before, we programmed both our robots on Arduino. Previous year, we tried to develop a logic that would automatically plan its tasks according current behaviour on the playing table; this year we went simple and hard-coded a sequence of tasks for the robots to do. This still contained some logic of what to do if the robot sees and obstacle in its way, but generally it was not too complicated.

This simple and systematic approach aided us in winning UK Eurobot finals and secured us a place at world finals in France where we placed 17th.

 

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