Cars in the park - Robotic day, October 24th 2009, Písek
On a Friday evening I found an e-mail about a Robotic day in Písek, a town with an oldest stone bridge in Europe. The event was organiyed by Radioklub Písek – a group of people involved in radio-electronics and robotics. The purpose of the event is to promote their club and attract young people to lectures, summer camps, etc. that the club gives.
Because I believe it is very important to attract young people, I decided to help by taking "my" robot with (actually, it is a university robot) and moving it and shaking it. Because the competition took place on the immediately following Saturday morning, it became difficult even to get there in time. Luckily, the colleagues from the other university in Prague had a similar idea and they also had a spare seat on a car. Without them, I could not make it across the country to Písek. Thank you!
The competition
The core of the event is a competition. The task of an autonomous vehicle is to follow a straight pathway in a park as far as possible (at most all the way across the park, which is cca. 300m long).
Immediately after our arrival, it was obvious that the pathway is too rough for "my" robot. It would be more of the shaking than of the moving. For this reason I decided to use a vision-based homologation program I prepared for Robotour 2009 instead of the simple "go straight using the compass" I wrote on a train to Prague that very morning. The robot is equipped only with a planar compass, which gets confused easily, when the robot is placed aslope.
Eight teams took part on the competition. Three of them were recent "adult" participants of Robotour 2009, two were students of a technical highs school and members of the Radioklub, three were small kids advised by their dads or grand-dads.
The results
The detailed results are available (in Czech) on the website of Radioklub Písek. Suffice to say Cogito MART (MART=MAtfyz' Robotic Team, Cogito = my unique ID within the MART's robotic activities) placed second in total and second in the "heavy" category.
One thing made me happy – Radioklub, who were better at Robotour, placed "only" third. And one thing was interesting – for Robotour, the winning team has to pre-scan the whole area manually. It took them almost three days this year. For this competition, they decided to use their vision-based path-following algorithm first. I was better in that round. Even though, unlike their robot, "my" robot is physically incapable to travel on such a rough surface. Mm, nice :-)
My vision-based algorithm never lost a track. In all three rounds the robot got stuck on a road hump. If I were to participate next year, I need a real outdoor robot. The result may have been improved by using the information, that the robot is stuck (which the robot does recognize). However, with an almost negative preparation time (good luck the robot was almost charged on Friday evening) I am more than happy that the robot moved at all.
After the competition
After the competition itself we spent a wonderful afternoon with the members of the Radioklub. First, we visited the old bridge with our robots (I am the person in black in the middle of the picture, "my" robot is the small one in front of me), then we were invited to the Tower.
The gallery
My pictures from the nice event are available in a gallery.