As I mentioned, I am part of the robotics club in my engineering school, cleverly named "Supaero Robotik Club". Our goal is to participate to the Eurobot Challenge (and win, as much as possible). There is a national selection, that takes place every year in La Ferté Bernard around the end of May. If you don't know about it, you can check their website, or let me explain it to you : each team can have two robots, of specified maximum sizes, that participate in matches. Each match opposes two teams (so between two and four robots), on a 3m*2m table, and they have to perform some specified actions. The theme and the actions change every year. This year, the theme is "Robotmovies". The robots have to move plastic cups full of polystyren balls, they have to pile wood cylinder, to close some "cinema claps", to lay some "carpets" on stairs, and to climb those stairs.
We are a team of 6 student, each with our own assignment : strategy, mechanics, electronics, actuators telemetry, and automation. I am myself responsible for the last one : I have to design and set the control system of the robots. I have access to the work already done in the club and I get help from a few previous members.
As soon as the rules were public, we made a replica of the official table in our premises.
We have a few sponsors (Akka, Thales), who financially help us and enable us to make high-functioning robots. Fortunately, we can machine the majority of the metal pieces in the workshop of our school. Right now, we have almost finished machining all the pieces for the first (and also the biggest) robot and we hope to see it move soon.
Each year, almost 200 teams meet up in La Ferté Bernard to compete. It is a great occasion to meet people with the same interests and enthusiasm for robotics. And seeing the other robots, how ingeniously they were made, how a small group of people from a not-so-well-known university has such great ideas, is infinitely inspiring.
If you're interested, you can watch some of the matches on Youtube.
As soon as the rules were public, we made a replica of the official table in our premises.
The next steps were
defining our strategy, the mechanical solution for each task. Then the
"mechanic" of our team had to make Catia files for the robots
(although right now, we only have one …).
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| The biggest of last year's robot (2014), named "Kapit" |
Each year, almost 200 teams meet up in La Ferté Bernard to compete. It is a great occasion to meet people with the same interests and enthusiasm for robotics. And seeing the other robots, how ingeniously they were made, how a small group of people from a not-so-well-known university has such great ideas, is infinitely inspiring.
If you're interested, you can watch some of the matches on Youtube.
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