pic: hard work paided off

[Philip W.]

I've heard about you from my brother, congrats!

I was there too for the "Virtual Robotics" Competition (no pictures, sorry). As a team of two, we had to design a robot fully in Inventor that: fits in certain dimensions; begins holding objects and drop them off; travel up a REALLY steep spiral ramp (so steep so that it was impossible for any robot to do that task in reality unless it had wheels that would move up and down [think Simbotics' 2004 robot with more precision]); travel up 10 inch steps. After designing, the robot needs to be animated in 3ds performing its tasks, and also a sort of computer presentation needs to be set up (ideally a simple website but everyone made a Powerpoint because of the time limit). All this also in 6 hours. Designing a gearbox was unnecessary and unpractical with so little time. Motors were pretended to have an infinite amount of torque, speed, and precision.

Our team from Woburn pretty much came up with no animation of the robot but did an awesome job designing a robot that CAN be built. Other teams had barely any knowledge in designing robots. One team had a triple jointed arm with NO MOTORS! Argh. Another team grabbed the objects with a HUGE magnet but it wasn't specified that the objects were magnetic. Despite missing an animation, the extent of our Inventor skills and designing skills led us to winning a silver medal.

Sorry for venting my anger, but that contest really aggravated me. I definitely will not be doing this again next year. Instead I will be participating in either CNC, CAM, Mechanical CADD, or Precision Machining (all still at the high school level). The Robotics competition also bothered me a lot because it was slow and boring. I will refrain from any ranting. Next year, I'll try to expose to everyone there something a little more exciting *hint hint*.