RoboCon is a competition run by my college to give secondary school students the opportunity to design, build and program their own robots. This year the competition took place on 10th and 11th April. The competition was a great success and saw a total of 16 teams turn up to compete in the compeition.
The process of developing RoboCon was fairly smooth. I had most involvement in creating our new brain boxes for this year. This involved soldering together two different PCBs, then sandwhiching a camera and some further electronics inbetween them. This taught me a new skill which was flux soldering, which I'm sure is not the technical name for it. This just requires you to use a template to smear flux infused solder onto a PCB, so the solder lines up with the pads. Then you just place your components onto the pads before heat-gunning it to get the solder to melt and fix the components in place. This was a new experience to me which taught me a bit about how things work in industry. It was also my first experience with PCBs which was quite fun. It eventually turned out as a kind of conveyor-belt which was churning out brain boxes with a new stage being completed every week.
The launch went relatively smoothly. We had a few activities set up for the teams to take part in, as well as a chance to tinker around with the kit. My involvement with this was mainly working on the slideshow which was presented once the teams entered the building. Once we had launched the competition, all we had to do was keep an eye on the robotics email inbox. Although, even with such a simple job there was still some setbacks. It was quite nerveracking sending emails on behalf of what was essentially a company email, but I am glad I got this experience as it allowed me to scrutinise what I was writing and zoom in on micro and macro elements of an email. Before the days of the competition on 10th and 11th we had a setup day. This allowed me to meet some college alumni who were lovely and definitely added an additional pressure to do a good job. I realised how much I was slacking when I was told how the rules worked by an alumnus who didn't have a hand in the creation of the game. Oh yeah, I should probably talk about the game. The theme was "Hot Potato" and emplored teams to eject certain april tagged cubes out of their quadrant. There was also a jacket potato - effectively a specialised cube - which belonged to each team and was located opposite to their quadrant. This allowed for different strategies to emerge and while some teams adopted a sweeping method, others employed a navigation system which allowed for swift collection of their jacket potato.
Overall, I loved this experience and it's something which taught me a lot about how to manage and run a large-scale community-driven project. It was quite inspiring to actually see the things that teams did during the competition. You got to see teams develop and solve problems in real time, adapting to issues that we had and to issues which cropped up randomly. You saw bare code which had basic movement down turn into fully fledged algorithms which reflected a game plan. This development was something which we took into account when developing our own robot for our own competition. We were really impressed with the initiative teams took and the way they truly engaged with the competition. I am proud to have been a part of this annual event and to get a good look at the moving parts behind it. I plan on being involved in future years as well, hopefully even after I have graduated. I learned a lot from the mentors who run robotics and give us the tools to make something which we can be proud of. I would recommend robotics to any computer science student who is craving a creative outlet. This is what you are looking for. Get involved in local competitions. Perhaps check out the RoboCon website if you wish to get involved.
- Rehan