TDK national competition was a contest that required students to wielding their imagination and innovation to build a robot that could conquer all the obstacles they settled. The title that year I attended was "the water boy." We were asked to build a robot that could took out a liter of water, went through a ramp, poured the water to several glasses, walked through road humps while containing the water and placed them properly on a desk.
The problem itself was just as crazy as the robot we've made.
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Another eye-catching function was its ability to move sidewise. The video below was a test to crab-sidle a ramp and to see if the motor was strong enough to do so.
My contribution
I did the whole programming with LabVIEW + MyRIO (an embedded system featured by NI). Although this was not my first time in controlling the robot, the size of this project was way larger than previous ones and thus, different from usual, the first thing came over my head was to design a debug system that can at least separate the error from the software and the hardware.
Since every signals sent to hardware was came from one source -- MyRIO, I could build a panel that registered all the signals sent from this embedded system.
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| This panel registered all the signals sent from MyRIO for debugging. |
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| Controller page for simulation. |
What had I learned?
This was not a small project and it necessitated cooperation with people in different majors to distribute the load. Since the other three people were national champions, I had learned so much in machining and mechanism more than those in the textbooks. In return, I tried my best to materialize all their demanded functions such as the acceleration of the wheels, functions that mimic the differential gears in the car, and the physical controller.
Besides the technical stuffs, the communication and cooperation were two main skills I had improved. Because another teammate and I were senior than the other two, we played a role to guide them through this competition. Instead of a bossing attitude, I prefer to personally engaging in all the meetings and brainstorm to let them realize one crucial thing in all kinds of cooperation was involvement: one needed to feel oneself belonged to this team alongside with ones responsibilities.
The process was a big pain in the butt, but at least we went through them together. Despite we only got the eighth place overall, we were a great team.
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