Robot Building Competition 2022

In late 2022, I along with 5 other fellow engineering students entered into Monash University's 2022 Robot Building Competition. The competition spanned 2 full days and featured a largely hardware hackathon style environment. Teams were to build a robot, capable of following a complex coloured course on the floor as fast as possible.

Construction

The robot was constructed with:

• Arduino Uno
• 2 photo-sensors
• 2 wheels, each individually driven by a motor
• 2 relays

The setup also included many jumper wires, a breadboard, a base, lots of tape and a batter to power the robot.

With every team given identical components, construction, design and most importantly good software separated teams apart. At the end of 2 days, 40 teams had completed a robot, although to various levels of success, with some robots struggling to follow a straight black line and with other confidently manouevring tight turns and taking coloured shortcuts.

Results

In the end, our robot (called Lobster for its wiggly movement) surpised us and the competition. Lobster completed all 3 courses, 2 of which in the fastest time recorded in the entire competition but unfortunately struggled with 1 other course, ballooning our average time. In all, we came 8th and had the opportunity to meet many like minded and passionate engineering students interested in robotics and Mechatronics engineering.

Technologies

• C++
• Arduino

The software we eventually wrote and ran along with the hardware configuration we used are available, open-source on GitHub.