A small robot explored the surface of our dinning hall today. While
the two-wheeler rolled around, we had a chat with the team of
students that designed and constructed it for the purposes of the
national Eurobot competition.
The constructors, Stefan, Gavrilo, Damjan and another Stefan are
members of Petnica's applied physics and electronics lab. Since we
made a commitment to support the lab, we supplied the team
with important components and compiler licenses. Among others,
their Eurobot competition robot has two proximity clicks and
two STM MINI boards inside of it, and the software that
governs it was written mostly in mikroC.
Gavrilo from the team explains how the robot competition works:
"The robots must be completely autonomous, no remote controls
allowed. Two robots at a time face off each other in a match. The
two robots run through a course performing a set of tasks for
points: moving around objects from point A to point B, picking mock
fruits while avoiding poisonous ones based on colors, and so on.
Many participating robots duel each other in this way, and at the
end of the tournament the winning robot is determined by the total sum of
accumulated points from all the matches."
Competitions like these drive innovation and help bring about a
new generation of engineers who will make tomorrows' robots
smarter. Eventually, Gavrilo, Damjan, Stefan and Stefan will move
on from constructing small competition robots to making their
bigger cousins that assemble cars or explore Mars.
For starters though, the team hopes to win first place at next
years' national Eurobot, so they could qualify for the final
international tournament in Europe (This years' competition was
their Eurobot debut). So what did they learn from this years'
experience that will help them improve for 2015?
Stefan said that after many sleepless nights spent preparing for the
competition, they learned much and they're a better team now. Their
biggest challenge was to successfully combine all the different
functionalities into a single robot that functions smoothly.
Because every team member has his own field of expertize, it's hard
to bring all these divergent skills together to focus them on a single goal.
But at the end, they all benefit from it.
We agree with that. Diversity breeds innovation. That's why
MikroElektronika supports so many architectures and programming
languages, gathering a variety of developers with different
approaches and outlooks on Libstock.
And of course, right here on the forums.
Sincerely,
MikroElektronika
