So, the last three weeks were full of hectic preparations to what culminated in this weekend’s Robotex competition. Our team was incredibly lucky and did just great, winning the fourth place out of 16 participants, beaten only by the three teams from IT College. Considering that the IT College guys have been polishing their three more-or-less similarly designed robots for three consecutive years under the careful supervision of an experienced leader, we do not feel a single bit disappointed to grant them the fair victory. Telliskivi fought its best, losing to the overall winner with a close score of just 5:6.

The main factor which gave the ITC robots a defining advantage was their superiority in speed. This is not something unsurpassable – there were just technical reasons why Telliskivi was tuned to a “slower” setting for the competition, and we’ll discuss this in a later post, now that we finally have time to go on describing the ins and outs of our robot.

We are waiting for the Robotex organizers to put the competition videos out on their web – those are really fun to watch. So far, let me just share a couple of my own shots.

The competition-ready robot

Just a day before Robotex, on Friday, we received the final cuts for the transparent plastic cover of our robot.

On Saturday, we also found out that the horizontal bar on the goals will be attached firmly, so we added a couple of “frames” to preserve the phone in case the robot decides to drive into the goal (which we now could afford to allow in the algorithm).

Nights before Robotex

Robotex is known for its promise of sleepless nights, and that promise was fulfilled. In fact, the bulk of the most important code was actually written during the last two nights. Something tells me it is not just our team who had it this way. Here’s how the competitor’s area looked at 3AM on the night before competition. Things didn’t change much all the way through to 8AM – there were still people working hard on the last-moment fixes.

Telliskivi’s first round
The only round I managed to get on my camera was our first game. It was easy to win – the opponent was extravagant, but non-aggressive. The opponent’s name was “Ventikas”, it was made by kids from the Kullo hobby club, and the sly trick it relied upon was to be large, stand at its own goal and blow air in three directions diverting the balls away from the goal. Unfortunately, the fan was not strong enough, otherwise it might turn out to be an unexpectedly hard opponent to beat. Note the careful aiming Telliskivi is making to get the ball exactly into the goal – at this point the judge asked me to stop filming as he suspected we might be remote-controlling it. That’s what good AI is all about – it looks like a human is behind it.

Telliskivi on TV

On the day before Robotex we actually got to show off our robot briefly on the early morning show on the national TV. Footage here (starting at 1:11:40).