FLL Robot

Description

The First Lego league for those who don't know is an international competition that takes place each year for ages 9-16. The overall winning team from each country goes on then to represent their country in the world finals. The competition consists of 3 sections on which you are judged, 1) Core values 2) your project and 3) the robot game.

Aims

Robot game – For this you must design and build a fully working Lego robot to do certain tasks. The tasks each robot does are called missions, and each mission carries different points. The more complex the mission, the more points you will be rewarded with. For the game itself you are given 2:30mins, to get as much points as possible.

Project – For the project you must come up with an innovative solution for a problem. To earn points you need to have your problem identification, innovative solution and an idea of how you’re going to share it with other people.

Progress

In September of my 4th year in secondary school me and a number of my friends signed up for the first Lego league. The competition was already very popular in the school, with the previous team winning the overall competition.

Given our inexperience in manufacturing and programming our robot which we named "Monty" was created using the process of trial and error, with no real design strategy in mind. We used the kit manual to help us create a rough working robot, however when it came to completing the numerous challenges, we were on our own.

From September till Christmas we worked exclusively on Monty, by removing components that worked, and leaving those that did. Monty slowly evolved into a capable robot. By Christmas we had Monty completing numerous tasks. Given that school took up most of our time, it was a slow progress and tedious process.

The below videos show the steady evolution of Monty's ability, we built upon each completed task to have the robot performing quite competently. Excuse the video quality, these were taken in early 2015 which a cheap smartphone camera.

In early to mid November we began working on the project aspect of the competition. We came up with the idea of www.framebyframesports.com. This is a website where users can view particular sports, frame by frame, to learn the skills necessary for each sport. To do this we would take a video of a particular action being done eg kicking a ball. We would take the best frames from the video, and lay them out side by side. By doing this the user could see how the action is done frame by frame. Sadly all videos and pictures were corrupted on a past laptop. The prototype of the website was finished by about mid - late December.

Problems

Since this was our first time creating a robot, we encountered many problems. By using trail and error, building Monty was a very slow progress with no real plan in place. We wasted a lot of time building the robots, when we could have been using a lot of that time to program it. Coming up to the competition, our code was lagging behind which would effect our overall result. The project as took time away from the programming, as the website had to be coded, videos of multiple sports had to be taken, and presentations had to be made. Overall, id say our main problem was time management, and neglecting a proper design strategy. This was the greatest lesson learnt.

Conclusion

The competition was held in the Radisson in Galway on the 24 th of January. Given our multiple problems heading into the competition, we gladly finished 5th overall out 28 teams at the competition. Our biggest achievement was winning the best project award for our work on framebyframe sports.