Final seminar

During the demonstration of the rescue robots I was surprised to understand that it is very interesting and exiting. All of us rooted for the robots and we were really disappointed and sad when some of them made mistakes. Of course the robots’ creators were the main fans, but all of us were involved into the demonstration.

Also I noticed that the robots based on NXT unit were better that the RXT ones. I’m not the specialist in it that is why I so not no the reason for this. May be it is just the coincidence that the algorithms of NXT robots were more difficult and intelligent and that is why they won the competition. Also it could happen that the RXT module has not so good details (like motors and wheels) or sensors. And that is why the physical construction of these robots is worse than the NXT robots.

I discovered that for all rescue robot teams the construction and design was the main part of the work. They also had some programming part, but it didn’t cause many problems. On the other hand some of rescue robot team members told that the construction was very complicated and still they have not been satisfied by their design. As I understand the algorithms they used are not too difficult and that is also surprising because I thought that the rescue robot algorithm should be quite intelligent. It was surprising for me because our team spent most of the time on programming and we didn’t think about the design at all.

On the other hand programming of the rescue robot is more difficult because its behavior depends on the rescue field design. So you can test it at home or on some test field and you think that it works fine, but during the competition the field map has some parts where your robot suddenly fails. No matter how your robot is programmed you are not secured from this situation. I can imagine that it is quite sad for the team members.

The same problem has teams who tried to create soccer robot. The quality of their strategy could be tested only during the real play. Also it depends from the strategy and construction of the opponent robot.

During final seminar after each presentation (we were almost the last group which present their work) my opinion about our theme and project improved every time. It was not because I did not like the other groups’ presentations and robot but because I like the type of our team. I mean that we could test our robot and the software we wrote at home, and I can hardly imagine the situation in class which we could not model at home. May be the spirit of competition is very good, but I psychologically fell well when the result of my work does not depend on other people. As I understood the competition results would not influence on the mark, but I can suppose it was very sad to see that the result of your monthly work looks loose the game.
Of course this is only my opinion so other people like to do the soccer or rescue robots. But I want to say that it was very good to have an opportunity to choose the other type of task, not the creating robot for competition.