Successful Webcast!

We had a great webcast at the Museum of Flight yesterday. We'll post a version recorded from other cameras later this week, as well as all our robot and mission monitoring programs.

From the West Seattle Herald

How We Did:
We knew a month or two ago that we would never win the final round on actual game points :-)  Our approach, using a realistic landscape (sandy, rocky, irregular) turned out to be even harder than we thought it would be, and we had to focus on doing just a few things (traverse  ridge, pick up one item, try to get it home).  But we were just happy to "push the envelope" and try something that's never been tried before in MoonBots.  We've learned so much (about traction, torque, balance, effects of dust, etc.), we now consider ourselves the world's leading authorities on Mindstorms rovers for harsh, extraterrestrial environments :-)

How Inspiration Did:
Well, Inspiration had some stage fright, showing many more glitches than in the previous few days. The sensor arms failed to pop out several times, and we ended up hitting the wall more than usual. But it didn't do anything terrible, and we were able to demonstrate our ultrasonic steering, though not our complete, end-to-end mission as planned.

What the Crowd Thought:
We had a large, enthusiastic crowd at the Museum. We talked about MoonBots and GLXP to a lot of kids and adults, and we had at least thirty people drive Inspiration by joystick at the end, before we had to pack up.  Even though the realistic landscape made things much harder for us, the crowd really, really liked the landscape. We think it really made the demonstration a simulation for them, something above a typical robot display.  We've had two teachers ask us to demo at their schools, too!

Upcoming Video:
We're going to put together a video explaining all the technical challenges we ran into, what we tried, and how we ended up with our final design. Believe us, every beam and peg of Inspiration is there for a reason. Each part is a winner in a competition of mini-designs for each feature or function.

Hey, the West Seattle Herald had a nice story about our webcast, with a video interview.  Thanks!

The Big Day

Though we were first to sign up for today, we're now the last of *five* team webcasts the judges are watching today!  Good luck to the teams, and good luck to the judges, too :-)

Our rover, "Inspiration", is ready at the Museum of Flight. 2:30pm Pacific.

"Inspiration" Rover Looking Good!

Three days until our webcast!  Our rover, "Inspiration", has had many, many changes over the weeks, as we "refactor" the design to make it more reliable and simpler. Here it is in current form:

Last week we did an early preview for a 4th Grade class. Asa and Kyle practiced Q&A, and did a demonstration. We then hooked up our joystick and let some kids drive!  Great questions from the kids, and great suggestions for improvements :-)  Since that preview, we rebuilt the arm to deliver more torque, added "stabilizer wheels" to improve stability on slopes, and designed a new pop-out mechanism for the ultrasonic sensors.  One more push this weekend before Sunday's webcast!

Clever Sensor Tricks for Sandy Lunar Surface

If you haven't read our team's proposal in detail, here is the most important thing, the thing that distinguishes our mission from every other team's, as far as we know:  we are using a sandy, rocky landscape!

Other teams are using flat table-tops, or LEGO(R) base plates for their lunar surfaces, as is the custom in FLL, and MoonBots (up to now, heh heh).  We decided to propose a realistic landscape, covered with sand, occasional rocks, and a bumpy High Ridge.  We feel this will really help the public "connect" with the mission during our live demonstration.

However, once you move to a sandy, rocky surface, you find that you cannot trust your motors they way you can on a flat table-top.  You tell a wheel to make four rotations, and you might find the robot only went a distance equal to three and a half rotations, or worse.

Our strategy to deal with this is to use ultrasonic steering.  We won't trust where our task items are on the landscape, we will find them in real time.  Besides making the mission achievable, it also has a bonus feature: it makes the robot tolerant of errors.  If the task item is a few inches away from where we humans thought it would be when programming the robot, the sensor-based steering will correct for that automatically!

To implement ultrasonic steering, we concluded we have to use two ultrasonic sensors, just as you can close your eyes and use your two ears to locate where a sound is coming from.  We think this is the first time binaural steering (like binocular, but for sound instead of light) has been successfully used in a LEGO robot competition.

Remember: our live webcast from the Museum of Flight is on Sunday, November 11th, 2012, at 2:30pm (Pacific).

Live Webcast Is On Nov. 11th!

MoonBots judges use webcasts to judge robot missions performed by teams around the world.

We've scheduled our live mission webcast for Sunday, November 11, at 2:30pm Pacific time. We're being hosted by the Museum of Flight, in Seattle, during the gala weekend opening of the Space Shuttle trainer exhibit in the new Space Gallery!

Tune in to our webcast then, at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/the-penguin-men .  Or better yet, if you will be in Seattle, come on down to the museum (admission/membership required), and you can see our robot perform in person. You might even get to operate it :-)

Webcast Reminder

Phase Two Submission

For the Phase Two September 15 deadline, here is our Scaled Model:

Download image: MoonBots 2012 Scaled Drawing - The Penguin Men.

And here is our Game Mission:   MoonBots 2012 Mission -- The Penguin Men