Inspiration

For our 12th meeting (which was a couple weeks ago), I figured we needed something to shake things up a bit. We have been using the generic robot design, with just slight changes to the arm out front, so I looked up several videos showing teams who have created a variety of different types of robots to solve as many parts of the Hydrodynamics Challenge as possible.


We watched three different ones, with all very different approaches and takeaways. Above is one of the three videos we watched. The main takeaway is that they were very creative in how they built the base robot and the various appendages to perform all the tasks. They also aimed to solve several tasks back to back, so an arm might move one way to drop something in a certain place and then it moves back the other way to slide a piece somewhere else. They even left pieces out on the field if they were no longer needed.

They have been mostly trying to program the robot to move around and do things with the simple arm, but this opened them up to the idea of building more, which they were excited about. One thing we do need to come back around to is the idea that they need to build the machines as simply as possible and in a way that they won't break easily. A few of the team were trying to activate a lever and used a bunch of complicated gears, when just a bump with a large arm would have done the job.

Our helper was missing for this session, but we were largely focused given the inspiration provided by the videos.

The Help Has Arrived

For our eleventh meeting of the Robotic Dudes, we had a helper come, which was great to see. We had three of the team missing, which helped it be a bit calmer, plus having an assistant coach shifted the dynamics a bit.

We had two groups working on solving various tasks in the Hydrodynamics Challenge. There were still a couple of boys just sort of wandering around and one who left early. One of the teams just had to have the robot drive forward a couple of feet and lift a lever to dump out a water barrel. They came pretty close to getting it to work. Another team was trying to pick up a broken pipe, but that team had to get the robot to navigate quite a bit further before grabbing the pipe, so more room to be off slightly. I think they need to use the light sensor to turn based on when they hit some guidance lines on the ground.

I attended a Vex competition a week or so, which my nephew was competing in. I had signed him off on the Robotics Merit Badge and thought it would be a good idea to come check out how Vex works. It is similar in some ways and different in others to how the Lego Robotics works. With Legos, there are many more intricate tasks to perform. The precision required is pretty crazy. With Vex, the tasks are more gross motor, picking up or pushing around plastic rings about the size of a donut. Also with Legos, only one team is on the board at a time. There are two boards side by side running concurrently, and there is a part where you can drop something on the other side of the field, but it is very minimal interaction. With Vex, you're on the same board so can run into each other, but you actually work in cooperation with each other for part of the challenge. Legos is completely autonomous, while Vex has both autonomous and remote control modes.