Thursday, February 24, 2011

WAMBot on ABC Catalyst

ABC Catalyst did a segment on the MAGIC 2010 competition, you can watch the Catalyst RobotWars MAGIC2010 segment on their website.

A more in-depth explanation of the problems we faced: The robots were stored overnight on site in a tent, and unfortunately the next day a lot of moisture had gathered in the electronics. Since we had used cheap GPS units, a number of them then failed on the day. The software we had written was not robust enough to cope with the faulty units and so the robots would think they were in an incorrect location. As the fleet of robots could not agree on their locations the map data was incomplete, and subsequently the robots were difficult to navigate.

Other software bugs, short battery life and communications drops also hindered the performance.

Next time: More testing, and focus on robustness and fallback options, and buy equipment with an IP rating of 32 or more.

A short clip of the interview is on youtube:

4 comments:

Michael Fazio said...

Hey! Alleged comminutions dropouts!!

Adrian said...

Haha, ok sorry Fazio. Alleged communications dropouts that allegedly caused heartbeat issues with the estop console.

Michael Fazio said...

That's better.....

Matthias said...

I watched this episode of Catalyst on the weekend and certainly did a double take when your gorgeous face popped up on screen.