Eurobot
Eurobot is an amateur robotics contest open to groups of young people from around the world, organized in teams. These teams can be formed by students as part of their studies, by independent clubs or by non-profit organizations. A team must be made up of two or more active participants. Team members may be up to 30 years old, each team may have one supervisor for which this age limit does not apply.
The aims of the contest are to promote public interest in robotics and encourage hands-on practice of science by young people. Eurobot is intended to take place in a friendly and sporting spirit.
For more information on the Eurobot contest, please visit the official web page.
Part of the Wonderbots members have been competing in this contest since 2010, but the official team was not formed until 2011, under the name of “AC MECS”. Since 2012, the team has been renamed to “Wonderbots”.
Eurobot 2012
This year the game gained in complexity by allowing each team to have 2 robots – a big one and a smaller one. This time the theme was named “Treasure Island”. Our team won second place on the national competition and 18th place in the final phase at La Ferté Bernard! We have only just begun to fight!
In figure 2 you can observe a possible configuration of the game table. There were three main objectives:
- Retrieve the treasure map (it lies on a thin plank leaning against the back border) – specifically the part of the treasure map that is of the same color as our robots’ starting area. There is a constraint: the robot must keep the piece of fabric with it during the match.
- Gather as many silver coins and gold bars as possible. As in the previous years, there are some fake items that do not add any value to the treasure you have, in this case the black coins.
- Discover the secret messages hidden in the bottles (here’s where the secondary robot can help).
The various treasures can lie on the base of the table, but can also be placed on “totems” (fixed alternating layers of cubes and rectangular boards, forming a system of shelves). The “palm tree” in the center of the board is just a decorative element.
The ships are represented by the brown parts painted on the playing area as well as the start areas. They are located along the side borders of the playing field, one on the red side and one on the purple side. Each ship was made of three parts:
- The captain’s bedroom, being the start area.
- The hold is the portion bounded by a brown piece of wood on the side and on the front corners of the playing area. It’s covered with a lid. This lid is initially closed and can be opened by any means to an angle of 45°. The opening is mechanically limited by a string on the side, outside of the playing field.
- The loading deck is the brown colored area located between the hold and the captain’s bedroom.
There were additional constraints, as follows:
- The robots were not allowed to go into the opponent’s captain’s bedroom.
- Each team could store only a single gold bar and up to four coins inside its own captain’s bedroom. No extra playing element could be taken into account when counting points.
- Only elements on the loading deck and in the hold of the opponent’s ship could have been “stolen” by the opponent’s robot.
- The elements within the opponent’s ship’s hold could have been taken only if the cover had been raised up.
Eurobot 2011
This is the first year in which we can say we have become a truly competitive team. Through the help of the Faculty of Automatic Control and Computer Science and Polygon Trading we managed to procure a pair of Maxon motors, together with the necessary gears and encoders. This is a major leap forward because now we have a functional motor block that will no longer require changing in the future. We had a lot of help from Adrem Invest who helped us acquire important electronic components and from COMOTI (The National Research and Development Institute, the Gas Turbines department) who accepted to shape for us the encasing of the robot.
The theme of the contest was “Chess’Up!” – the robots had to form towers out of pawns, kings and queens and place them on their respective color. There were special zones on the table that could bring you a bonus and there were some areas on which the points were limited to the value of one single pawn. For a better understanding of the table configuration you can check out Fig. 1 (extracted from the official rules of the contest).
Fig. 1. Game Table
We only got fourth place in this competition, but we are confident that the future can only bring us success. You can have a look at our gallery for pictures of the robot, or you can visit our YouTube Channel for videos of it working (a simple search for “AC MECS” will surely bring you to it).
Eurobot 2010
In 2010, the robots had to “Feed the world”: they had to collect as many fruit (“oranges” – orange spheres), vegetables (“tomatoes” – red spheres) and cereal (“corn” – white and black cylinders) as possible. The game table had a ramp on which the oranges could be found (at a certain distance from the ground, sitting on cylinders). The tomatoes and corn were randomly placed across the table. The corn could be “good” – if it was white – or “bad”, if it was black. The black corns didn’t have value and were screwed to the table.
Even with limited resources, we managed to homologate and get the fifth place.