ABU Robocon 2020 HK - Reflection
Robocon 2020 - Hong Kong Contest
All students of engineering, including diplomas & undergraduates can participate in this contest. ROBOCON gives them a chance to think creatively. It brings together young people with similar skills and promotes friendship amongst them. When the young people who are the future of a country, get a chance to innovate, it helps in the advancements of the broadcasting and engineering skills and paves way for invention.
In this competition, the students are asked to create a robot, which has to complete a specified task within a stipulated period. The group of students whose robot is able to perform the task with most accuracy wins the prize. Every year the contest is organized by a member country, who decides the theme of the contest.
Theme
Robocon 2020 Theme:
Team Crimson’s Passing Robot and Try Robot
These are what our team developed:
Reflection
This is my second year playing as a team member in robocon. In this contest I was the operator of passing robot.
Although we won the BEST INSTITUTE ENTITY AWARD, we only ranked 8th as Team Crimson.
2020 was a tough year. Almost every seniors from our team graduated from 2019. We only have some final year students who picked robocon as final year project, which means they have little or no experence at all. When we finally came out some idea and want to try to prototype them, Siege of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University happened. My university were closed, and the school has to use their resource for reparation. Our budget has been cutted off and we cannot afford new motors and materials. Then the COVID-19 pandemic quickly arrives to Hong Kong and the school remained closed to everyone. Even professors have disallowed us to work at robotics lab. The progress was completely freezed for around six months. Many of our team members have slowly losing their ambitions.
Luckily we still managed to still make the robots for competition, they have not enough stability and they were slow. Since we don’t have a sample game field for testing, and we have wasted some of the test run chances, the robot success rate were not too high.
I, as a team member with only one year experence, I spotted some mistakes that we made last year and we repeated it this year.
Here are some of my thoughts… of how our team can be improved.
The Preparation Matters
We need to have better preparation.
Tools and Backup Components
For every test run, test room and even rehearsal, we must bring all the tools and backup components.
In Both 19 and 20 Robocon, we have wasted at least one test run chance because the robots had some error and we had not bring the suitable tools to fix them.
1 | 要帶嘅野: |
For Every Changes
When making changes to the robot, it is advisable to notice everyone in the team (Especially the robot operator!)
It is better to test the robot immediately after every changes (such as replacement of Components, program changes).
DON’T MAKE CHANGES before the night of test run, test room, rehearsal and even the competition, unless you feel it is vital.
Side Note: When deciding the control buttons, programmers should alway listen to what the robot operator (user) need, and It is not advisable to have complex buttons (No Combo shits, No Mulitple Modes). A simple design is a good design.
Read the Rules
Read the fucking Rules. Especially the game field members. Ask questions in every Q&A sessions.
Safety and Stability Concerns
In Robocon 2020, during the competition, we have experenced issues that the battery was not well connected. This greatly hindered our performance and almost resulted in volation.
1 | 比賽前要準備好嘅野： |
