I'm a senior in college and started a robotics club at my university a few years back. We've used VEX kits and Arduinos for projects the past few years and now our department is encouraging us to participate in or host some sort of robotics competition. There is a collegiate level VEX competition, but I'm a huge advocate of Arduino and would prefer to pursue an Arduino-based competition.
I did a little Googling, but wasn't able to find many competitions centered around Arduinos. Does anyone know if there are any competitions on the U.S. east coast? If not, any guidance on hosting our own competition would be great.
Thanks in advance for your advice!
RoboticsGuy:
I'm a senior in college and started a robotics club at my university a few years back. We've used VEX kits and Arduinos for projects the past few years and now our department is encouraging us to participate in or host some sort of robotics competition. There is a collegiate level VEX competition, but I'm a huge advocate of Arduino and would prefer to pursue an Arduino-based competition.
I did a little Googling, but wasn't able to find many competitions centered around Arduinos. Does anyone know if there are any competitions on the U.S. east coast? If not, any guidance on hosting our own competition would be great.
Thanks in advance for your advice!
I don't know the level you're working at, so my suggestions may be wide of the mark.
- Build a maze and get the competitors to build a robot that will find its way to the end of the maze the quickest. To make it more difficult, you could restrict the width of the maze lanes so that the robot will have to be small enough to fit in the lanes and to turn corners. Have the robot bridge two contacts at the start and at the finish so that you can use an Arduino to time the run. To increase the difficulty, put a cover/lid over the maze so that the competitors won't know the layout of it in advance and also to restrict the height of the robots. Obviously, the more restrictions, the harder the competition will be.
- Even more difficult would be to get the competitors to build a bicycling robot, to see how far it could travel without falling over. The course could be made as difficult as you like, with potholes, reverse camber, loose sand and other hazards. You could also time the run. If you had some hazards that could be knocked over, you could mark it like a gymkhana, four faults for each hazard knocked down. Size, for both of these, will depend on the space and time you have available.
My favorite robot competition is robot Sumo, but to make a good Sumo robot takes a lot of effort.
The maze solver is a good idea too, but still fairly complex. The Sumo and maze bots are good choices for advanced robotics.
A line following robot is a bit easier, but is still challenging when you start ramping up the speed for competition because it becomes a lot harder to stay on the line when you're approaching 1 meter per second.
The line following competition can also be made more challenging by leaving a break in the line and forcing the robot to re-acquire.
One thing to consider is "Arduino" is a pretty nebulous term these days. A competitor with an Arduino Uno is probably going to get smoked by another competitor using a Due. If it were me, I'd restrict competitors to ATmega328 based Arduinos (a bit more challenging than using a Mega2560). Also consider if you will allow multiple microcontrollers in a 'bot.