Maybe you're a technology geek and always wanted to build your own robots. Well now anyone can learn to build robots from easily accessible materials. At a Creative Robotics mini-competition in Beijing, teachers, students and factory workers gathered to pit their complex robots against each other.
This is a really exciting game. Teams compete to capture and control strategic objects. Each team constructs two robots: a lightweight mouse robot and a larger cat robot. The object of the game is to win as many points as possible by placing negative or blue objects inside the opponents point zones and as many positive or red objects in your own zone. Robots make all the moves, with the cat and mouse playing as teammates.
Wang Meng's team has just won the first round. He's an amateur robot enthusiast and explains the working principle of the robots.
"Simply speaking, the core components of a robot lie in its transmitters and receptors. The basic working principle is just like that of a TV remote control. Then it relies on different equipment with the robot to achieve the tasks ordered by the transmitters."
To move the objects in the game Wang Meng has designed something like a scoop on a bulldozer for his cat robot. And it works! The "scoop" can push and place up to five objects into the point zones at the same time. And then they have the highest number of objects in their zone. But there is a fly in the ointment. Players are hit with negative points when the "scoop" cannot offload blue objects after picking them up.
On the contrary, another team scores points for the mistakes of the opposite side. How do they achieve that? Senior high school student Zhu Chuan explains.
"We design a "claw" for our cat. So it can select and pick up red object and place it into the point zone. It works just like a claw crane. This way we avoid negative points."
If the cat robot acts as a scorer, then the mouse robot should be called a "goal keeper". It may drive anywhere it wants inside the arena. It pushes objects or other robots in order to keep negative points off its team's platform. But it cannot score any points.
Both the cat and mouse are on wheels. That makes these robots look more like toy cars than the robots we typically imagine.
But they get the job done. The top four teams from these games will go on to take part in the Creative Robotics National Final in Shanghai late next month.
(CRI December 29, 2003)
