Robotics 2010-2011

This page is a retrospective on my experience in robotics during 2010 and 2011, and will focus only the programming aspects robotics in 2010 to 2011.

The competition for that year was called ‘Logomotion’ – in essence, the robot had to place inflatable tubes onto pegs on the wall. The higher the peg, the more points were scored. The first 30 seconds was an autonomous mode – any tubes places during this period would lead to bonus points. The next 2 minutes was the teleoperated period, where humans could operate the robot to try and score points. In the last 30 seconds, the robot would try and place minibots onto poles. The minibot who climbed to the top first would receive a large amount of bonus points. Pictures can be found on our club website

In general, the entire year was plagued by hardware issues. The software more or less worked, at least for the parts I was able to test and debug ahead of time, but was monolithic and in retrospect, a clumsy attempt to shoehorn a procedural programming style into an OOP framework. The code can be examined in our repository and was written mainly by me and my mentor, Mr. Cooper. Without his intervention, I probably would have ended up writing all the code into a single class in a single file. As it was, the bulk of the code I wrote can be found in MyRobot.cpp.

I never was able to really get autonomous working (but to be fair, I was never given the opportunity to test and debug it), but nearly everything else worked, more or less.