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In this photo we can see three handsome men and a beautiful lady. The one carrying our minisumo robot its me. This was our first robotics tournament, it went pretty well.
A professor of my institute share with us a flyer of this tournament, we were interested in all this robotics stuff but didn't have the opportunity to work in a project. This was like a straight forward signal to put hands on, and we did.
We participated in the category of minisumo robot. In this category, participants are ment to build an autonomous robot of 10 x 10 (cm) with no height limit-.
Our first problem was the lack of material, we had some components but they were not the option for this type of competitive robot. We qualified to the second phase of the tournament.
For the second phase of the tournament we made a new robot. The first one was made in a rush and with "meh" components, the difference between both robots was night and day.
We bought special wheels for this kind of robots, smaller infrarred sensors, better motors and made a new chassis has a better distribution of weight and was better builted.
Unfortunately, we lost in quarter final (at least we did loose versus the champion of the tournament haha).
Both robots were designed in Fusion 360 and then 3D printed with an Ender 3 V2 of my own.
I spent a lot of time with this second robot, we struggle assembling the first one due to the lack of space. For this version, my goal was to use more wisely the space and to fix all the components to the chassis of the robot.
It was a difficult task because the 18650 batteries are pretty big, but I figure it out a way to make it work.
After our participation, in both phases of the tournament, our team decided to organize a similar event for our school.
The vision of the tournament was to encourage the students of our institution to apply his knowledge in something physical, a minisumo robot. It's important to remember the context, after a 2 years lockdown, engineering students needed to get the groove back, you know?
Online classes were okay, but there is a big gap between theory and practice and we wanted to reduce it.
We made an enrollment formulary with Microsoft Forms and advertised it in our facebook page we also share it in Facebook groups. After 3 weeks, we had 0 participants. This was pretty frustating, but we didn't gave up.
To make it more attractive, we wanted to offer 1 academic credit (it's mandatory to get 5 credits before 7th semester), so, we talked with our counselor and he approved our idea. And to encourage students with no experience in the field to participate, we develop two basic courses. The first one a 3D CAD course with Fusion 360 taught by me, and an Arduino (programming) course taught by one of my teammates.
This made a big difference...
MINISUMO ROBOT TOURNAMENT RAS-ITT
IEEE Student Branch and RAS Student Chapter
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