The ASEE 2018 robotics competition is held in Salt Lake City Utah, each year the ‘game’ is designed based on the location of the competition. Utah is the beehive state so this year’s competition is designed around the idea of worker bees collecting honey from a beehive.
THE GOAL:
To design and build an autonomous robot that can transport honey (orange and white ping pong balls) from the hive (track) to the corner pockets on the track. The robots will have a maximum time of 120 seconds in each of their four allotted trials. The robot must begin within an 8” X 12” X 10” high size limit but may expand to any size during a trial. An Exhibit Session will precede the robot trials.
THE TRACK:
My First Impressions
- This year we see a drastic change in the navigation pattern that must happen. Typically we are presented with some type of line follow but I have a feeling that this year the tape will play much less of a roll in the navigation if any at all.
- It may be beneficial to ignore any tape navigation and just simply focus on collecting the balls and sorting them as efficiently as possible. After all there is no specific order in which anything needs to happen unless you design a robot that must pick up orange vs white balls with separate mechanisms.
- Placing the balls in their respective collection areas (in the corners of the track) is going to prove somewhat difficult as the robot not only needs to find the collection area but it was strategically designed such that not all of the balls can fit into one collection area without being stacked.
- Stacking the balls is difficult and most teams would likely benefit from simply placing about half of each set of balls in each colored area.
Will you be uploading video of this years competition?
Unfortunately I’m not sure many of them came out well due to people getting in the way. I haven’t reviewed them yet but I will get around to it, I’ll try to do that before the end of this month.
It can be a stressful situation for students so I don’t ask them to move if they get in the way of the camera so a lot of times, I’m sure due to nerves, they forget it’s there and stand right in front of it. Maybe next year I can come up with a better solution where it’s more of a bird’s eye view or at least peers over people.
Thanks for the inquiry.