15 hrs sleep

If you ask me how much sleep I got in past week, I count it no more than 15 hrs; But if you ask me how much sleep I got on Saturday evening, I had over 15 hrs. Such contrast is so normal for majority of my classmate, some may even go extreme without two nights sleep straight. But, we are so happy for Saturday Robot Design Competition Challenge, also happy it done now.

Where should I start?

This is Spartan Warrior, also the name of our robot. So, that makes our team as "The Spartans". And this, is the original opening ceremony music I put together, contains: robot moving sounds, "How are you doing" from Joe's famous talk, robot moving sound, silly "burp" sound, pause (someone from team will say "Hey, Spartan, you are a GOOD robot"!), then Robot singing "What a wonderful life" (part of it, right by the middle of sentence "what won---"), robot moving sound, following by power off as failing robot fall. As I was happily preparing this, I found out that this music .wav file is about 4 MB, but robot can only handle maximum 130KB, that's a heart broken for me to start alternative. But, you never know what could happen, right? After a few search, I ended up choosing the music on my iPod Michael Smith into prelude, the wonderful drum beat. We will march into the stage with our Spartan, holding different (toy) weapon :) We won the best opening ceremony here. Spartan did wonderful dance with the music, esp. lift up the flag, which made the audience laugh hard. Our Italian Nuclear scientist prints the Spartan flag on both side of napkin. We even had a shinning red flashlight :)





I told the team that we should do a fun exit instead of simple walking away. So we danced toward the crowded with Bob's drum playing.


Then we have four activities competition: Relay Race, Archery, Scavenger hunt, and Sumo.
other teams opening:








During relay race, none of teams made through the race itself before handing over the relay. it turns out that NXT 2.0 light sensor is not good. It has hard time to distinguish dark shadow and black race line. Several robots start walking in a circle since they got trapped with its own shadow. In stead of wondering what happened with our robot, we, the human beings have to laugh at ourselves for imply believe what we purchase always have the best quality. Is that the wake up call applying for what we purchase out of this competition?





Scavenger Hunt:
We should definitely feel proud of our scavenger hunt Robot, which we call it out "Scorpion". It will get close to detect the color, then decide if it should open the door to grasp it or push it away.











Archery:
Three options to choose, 25, 30 or 50 inches to shoot. We should have choose the longer range as 50 as all three tempts Spartan shoots too far, near the crowd. So, we lost significant points here.




Sumo:
This is the activity getting the most attention. All kind of strategies came in, checking on weight, going under as one of approach. Our Spartan was attached with multiple magnets to suck enemy close and click them out soon. We won some, and lost the last match as Spartan is blind(yes, we made Spartan blind). Only go with the sound to save motor and energy. Some robot reduce speed in order to keep strength for pushing. Ironically, our Spartan just decided to go on his own. Is that sometimes Robot required break, getting some time off??


Here, Andrai creates a fan to cool off their heated robot :)


weight the robot before the competition.

Competition Ring:



By now, one of our team members, Ace, completely fall into sleep nearby. He was one of people stayed overnight, 30 hours without sleep, several of them by afternoon, already fall into sleep in the auditorium.



some Sumo scenes:




One of robots pushed this Black bowl-look robot out. Since it was made by a Russian student, we joked that no one could beat the Russia weapon. Soon, it was beat down by (a simple engineering concept)simple look robot. One American student said "We conquer the War, Warm-War(compare with cold-war)!" You have to admit, no matter how much short of sleep we got, we can not loose the humor.


By now, my team won some and loose badly at Archery, got 4th out of 8. We are happy, not caring the result. The next task, is to get home and catch up sleep.

Here are some highlights:








some of pictures you can find from my photos at Facebook.


This is our air force classmate, who is so funny, checking on us periodically during this week preparation.



Here is the happy me with Spartan, looking so exhausted, red eyes, pale face with smile. oh, I love this whole experience!