DMITROBOT - the second open tournament in robotics

Nowadays, there are few who are surprised by the robot competitions: riding, walking, running, crawling, flying and other fighting humanoid pieces of iron have long been actively competing in a heap of various disciplines - from simple and understandable races to downright scuffles and all sorts of exotic types such as dancing and basketball.
We also decided (employees of the Dmitrov branch of the University "Dubna" ) to keep up: this year the Dmitrobot robots tournament is held for the second time.

The tournament format is still austere - line racing, classic discipline. The age of the participants is different: they are mostly middle-school students, but there are also students.
The venue for this year’s tournament was Dubna, or rather the Ratmino sanatorium, located near the city:


The tournament is only gaining momentum and has a “chamber” character, the geography this year has embraced Moscow, Dmitrov, Dubna and Yaroslavl; due to the small number of participants, the competition program had to be slightly curtailed, which gave the following measures in the dry residue:

1. Excursion to the robotic production;
2. Lecture about Chebyshev lambda mechanisms and Chebyshev polynomials;
3. Free competition of creative models (presentation of robots "on a free theme");
4. Well, finally, the race!

First things first.

Excursion to the robotic production

After registration and announcement of the regulations, the participants were taken on a tour of the shops of the enterprise VNITEP - manufacturer of laser cutting machines for metals.

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Well, what can I say: citizens understand a lot about heavy metal. Production equipment is my respect. The lecture on industrial use of robots is especially easy to understand at the moment when these same robots cut-drill-turn a piece of steel into a quarter-ton weight. You also start looking at your “home” robots with respectful apprehension: avon it, which turns out to be, in principle, something!

Lecture about Chebyshev lambda mechanisms and Chebyshev polynomials

Returning from the tour, the participants listened to a lecture about the life and work of one of the most serious Russian mathematicians - Pafnutia Lvovich Chebyshev . Well, the Chebyshev integrals for many readers probably hiccupped in the second semester of the analysis, many still tremble at this phrase. And for those who survived the integrals, they probably still have a vague horror moving inside their memory of the Cherbyshev polynomials (this is already on the course of mathematical modeling or numerical methods, or who had it). All these wonderful things in the lecture and told.


But, as they say, mathematics only becomes material and visible when it is embodied in machines. An excellent illustration of this thesis are the lambda mechanisms. And, perhaps, the most amazing of all the realizations of the relevant Chebyshev ideas is the stopping machine - that's really steam bath as it is!

Free competition of creative models

Free competition is free competition. Show what you want, tell what you can! This time four models were presented.
The first is a robot that gets out of the maze according to the “right-hand rule”. The ultrasonic sensor detects the distance to the most distant wall and drags the robot there. The author is a student of the 8th grade.


The second model is a robot that collects a pyramid of cubes. The authors graduated from the 7th and 8th grades.


The third model — the most serious — is a robot that forms a map of the surrounding space using laser triangulation (the author is a graduate student from Yaroslavl).


And the fourth model is a robot for racing with wheels driven by individual servomotors (the author is a third-year student at Dmitrov College).

Race

Upon completion of the presentation of the models, the race began. There were four participants (in the sense of robots).
Reaper (Dmitrov):


Researcher (Dmitrov):


Crawler (Dubna):


R2 (Moscow):


According to the results of the races, the Reaper, using servomotors for course correction, won by a significant margin.


As a result, the participants received prizes (books kindly provided for this purpose by the Dynasty Foundation), and the organizers - the sea of ​​fun and firm confidence to repeat everything next year, but with a much larger scale.
In general, buy our elephants! I mean, if anyone is interested in the topic of robotic races - come to us in a year on Dmitrobot-3!

The article is a cut-down version of the original (where there are more pictures), everything is published with the consent of the author in order to popularize the competition and attract new robot builders.