Building a Robocon Robot
Two years on a forty-person team building two robots every year.
- Robotics
- Teamwork
ABU Robocon is an annual international robotics competition; the Indian qualifier, DD-Robocon, runs against a fresh problem statement each year. Between 2018 and 2020 I was part of Team KJSCE Robocon, around forty people across mechanical, electronics, and software, running a sub-team in my first year and serving as vice captain for the second.
The team placed National Rank 8 and won Best Solution Idea among 50+ teams at DD-Robocon 2020.
Most of what I learned there was not about robots. A team of forty on an annual cycle loses its entire senior half every year, so the hardest problem we had was continuity: documenting decisions well enough that next year’s team did not have to rediscover them, and bringing new members far enough in that the team was theirs to carry rather than just something they worked on.
The simulation work I did for the team, path planning and projectile motion in MATLAB, is written up separately in Simulating a Competition Robot.
I really need to update this page soon. A lot of experiences missing here. Lots of fond memories that I would like not to forget :)