Pi Wars: Are you ready to compete?
This year’s second place winners, Robot Apocalypse Committee, relay their experience of the 2018 Raspberry Pi Robotics Challenge Competition.
Transcript of the video
“We arrived at the venue filled with both excitement and dread, greeted by our first event — the Minimal Maze. We were least confident about this particular challenge, and so to no surprise the first two runs failed at the first bend. However, to our great delight (and surprise) the final attempt ran perfectly!
But alas, this joy was short-lived: disaster struck in the form of a corrupted SD card. And so, having missed an event already, we wrote off the rest of the competition as lost — it was now that Joe decided to remember that he’d made a backup of SD card the night before. So with renewed spirit, and SD card, we tackled the Obstacle Course. Will absolutely thrashed all previous records with his expert maneuvering, and also managed to secure a slot for the Duck Shoot, which we had missed previously. While the challenge started terribly, we soon managed to grasp the strategy needed to finish with a respectable score.
After lunch, the first challenge was the Straight Line Speed test. Although we had managed to previously ace this during testing, last minute alterations to ‘improve performance’ unfortunately resulted in a dismal performance. On the other hand, we somehow managed to pass straight to the quarter-finals of the robotic duel PiNoon (winning one match, with the opponents abandoning the rest). We managed to obtain many free points this way; however, we were ousted in our first full match — mostly limited by our lack of practice. The final challenge was Over the Rainbow, which required an impressive amount of coding for image processing and therefore was one of the hardest, which also meant we weren’t completely confident that it would work. But somehow, we performed very well: securing second place for that challenge.
In the end, we won first place for the Obstacle Course and the Minimal Maze, as well as second place for Somewhere Over the Rainbow— particularly interesting because they represented the hardest challenges for manual and autonomous control respectively.
Overall, we secured second place. Only ~100 points behind the winners (we could give you a plethora of excuses and logical arguments as to why that was the case).
It was a fantastic experience to develop our robot and skills across the 10 weeks of preparation, but also to actively compete with and meet new people on the day of the event. We hope to enter many more competitions like this in the future! RAC signing off.”
This video and its transcript was produced by William and Bhuvan, members of the ‘Robot Apocalypse Committee’ team, who competed at Pi Wars 2018.
Oxbridge Inspire delivers innovative STEM education and provides guidance and inspiration to young people wishing to pursue STEM subjects at University and beyond. To find out more about Oxbridge Inspire and the courses and activities we offer, visit our website.
