Monday, May 23, 2011

Robot Business Time!

Our Monday was pretty busy getting down to business on our robots again, we say goodbye to Prof. Kelso today, as he is going home for his daughter's graduation, and say grüezi to Prof. Erdman and his family!

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This is a photo of the log man on one of the nicer streets to eat on in Winterthur, there are quite a few cafes and outdoor seating in the area.
So today we had another 8 hour work day on our robots. The major project on our seminar is the Ganymede-Rover Prototype fabrication. Our task is to design, build and test an autonomous robot that has to fulfill a challenge.

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This is our "playground" or the testing grounds for our rover prototypes. There will be two teams competing head to head at a time on this playground. The challenge is to make your robot go out into the environment and retrieve the different colored spheres, simulating possible collection of material samples on Ganymede, a moon of Jupiter. The further the spheres are away from the starting positions, in the lower left and right hand corners of the picture, the more points they will be worth. Also you must bring the samples back to the "landing point," to receceive points and for further testing, of course. The robots are not allowed to be disturbed in any way by outside forces once the competition begins. It sounds fairly straightforward, but working with legos that have limited programming capabilities makes this design challenge super "schwer" or difficult.

Everyone seemed to be productive on this Monday after our weekend trips to München and some of us Zürich, and the robots are looking good!

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This is team GastroBlitz's awesome robot, it truly is a work of art. (Emily, Aaron, Stephen, Jin)

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Team Inhomogeneous's rover (Ross, Jeremiah, Chelsea, Travis, Jessy)

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This is the latest model of team Leggo My Eggo's rover (Arthur, Erik, Will, Ruben)
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This is team Matterhorn's rover (Taylor, David, Brian, Kendall)

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This is team Winning's rover (Nick, Ben, Gus, Matt)
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And last but not least we have the rover from the Winterthur Warriors (Steph, Steven, Andy, Allie)


Tomorrow is another full work day so we'll be in the lab doing more testing and developing of our rovers!