In my first/second year studying in UKM, my faculty organized the first competition involving robots. The competition was called “Robomaze”. We were supposed to program the robot to pass through an obstacle course. At first, I was a little reluctant to join because I was studying computer science which doesn’t involve hardware. To be honest, I was afraid of losing. I had no confidence of beating the other guys. There are some really good programmers in my course and others as well.
In the end, I did join the competition. The fear of losing is still there but I really wanted to test my skills and knowledge against the other 50+ or more witty brains.
The robot actually looks like a stripped down “car”. It has two big wheels at the back and another smaller on at the front. It has two types of sensor detectors — one to detect light and another two to detect objects. We were given some basic tutorial on how to program and control the robots. We get to play and experiment with the robots a few days before the competition day.
On the day of the competition, we were given a “map” of how the obstacle course will look like. We then had a certain amount of time to plan and do the coding. We then had to store the coding into a diskette and hand it over to the judge. We were only able to take it back when its our turn to test it out in the obstacle course.
When all of us saw the obstacle course for the first time, everyone was in shock. The “map” that was given earlier was different compared to the actual course itself. The whole place erupted and became noisier than a market. In the end, all of us had to rethink our design for the coding. We were given 2 minutes to modify our codes before running the robot on the course.
(this post will continue onto the next……)
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