IB学生在青少年机器人世界选拔赛中荣获佳绩

                                       April 14, 2014

1 Introduction

Robocup Junior (RCJ) is an important component of the world first-class competition Robocup which is mainly aimed on the demographic of junior competitors. The competition focus on developing students international co- operation and independent innovation. it has been the most important robot competition around the world currently, and the Robocup Junior China Region Competition is aiming to discover top intelligent students in robotics area all around China to take part in the international competition.

XSRoboLab is a newly established association (01/20/2014) in Xiaoshi High School which focus on developing intelligent and competitive robots. The founding members including Thomas Lou, Simon Zhang, Joseph Wang, Peter Chen, Kevin Zhu, Tom Yang, John Zhao and Mr. Mackay as our supervisor.

2 Preparation & Development 

2.1 Project description

We chose to take part in the project which involve two main tasks, one is to be able to let the robot follow the white line printed on the ground while avoid hitting on the obstacles set on the path; two is to be able to move on a 3-deminsional surface and picking up ping-pong balls placed in certain position.

2.2 Development details

XSRoboLab started developing the robot to take part in RCJ since it was established (01/20/2014). We decided to develop on the platform of Arduino Uno which means all programs will be written based on board Arduino. The reason we chose Arduino as the development platform is because its well supported by the community and it’s really easy using the board to control exterior hardware, and most importantly, it’s relatively cheap.

Our robots exterior hardware including the ultrasonic emitter&detector, photo-electric detectors, Bluetooth receiver&transmitter, motors, several servos...

For further technical details & media sources, please go see the development log...

3 The Competition

First of all, the result can’t fully represent the effort we’ve put into the project. We are proud of ourselves that we actually built a intelligent robot which we are able to control and program.(BTW, it’s so cool:/)

Before 1st day’s competition, we worked till 2 am in the hotel room trying to solve the technical problems in detecting the obstacles. Before 2nd day’s competition, we worked till 3 am in the hotel room designing and construct- ing the exterior hardware of catching and placing the ping-pong balls. The rush could be avoid if we were more experienced and were more familiar with the actual competing ground. However, I personally really enjoy the time our team work so hard together for the same target. It may be difficult for one person to accomplish that, but as a team, we are pretty much invincible.

Secondly, we developed the robot from nothing by all ourselves. That's due to the fact that a great amount of primary & junior competitors have a Mr. all-know adviser teaching them and guiding them (maybe even making the robot for them). As a result, many teams have amazing robots that have the ability of winning awards, however, team members don’t usually learn much from the competition, they are more likely to fail on compulsory tests such as real time programming and debugging... In contrast, for our team, we worked everything out on our own, with our own knowledge. That’s why we won the highest score in real-time programming & debugging and principle explaining part, and that’s something more valuable than winning the competition in my opinion.

In general, despite the unfortunate events caused by the lack of experience and final award, the trip to Macao was a immense fun, it led us on the road of automation and engineering in our future development, I'm sure we are going to intend the robot competition in 2015 with next-gen IB students.