Nicholas’ Soccer Blog

Hi Readers,

A few days ago our class got the privilege to have a guest visit from a robotic engineer. He played a video for us that told us about a robotic competition called First Robotics. He was promoting the competition to our age. The video showed us clips of previous challenges.

Participants built robots to perform a task. One of the tasks was to build a robot that could successfully go through a maze without hitting the edges of blocks. It had to knock blocks of the top of a boulder and other challenging tasks. The robot had to be previously programmed which means there were no remote controls involved. There were also bigger battle robots which could be controlled by remote.

Later on, after we had finished watching the video he brought in his robots. It was very exciting because he had a robot called the vexplorer. We were all going to get a chance to drive it!

Together we figured out what all the different controls did. These vexplorers (the robots we were driving)  could be programed to act on their own but in our case we just drove them with a remote control. Some of the buttons lowered the claw, some opened the claw, others moved the robot around. The coolest part of the whole experience was that there was a video camera mounted on top of the claw that would make everything the robot could see appear on the screen. We were not aloud to look at the robot, only at the screen.

The vexplorer could perform tasks such as picking up a pop can or juice box. Other bots specialized in picking up tennis balls. My favorite robot to drive was the tennis ball robot. I thought it was the most spectacular because it would spin a wheel placed on its claw backwards in order to “suck in” the tennis ball.

The robot shown in the picture was not one of the robots we drove. The robot we drove was similar except with a claw coming out of the front.

Thanks for reading and bye for now!

Photo by: shygantic