Automate Denver! (instead of demo)

I'd planned a Data Bus Demo today but foolishly cancelled, listening to the weather reports of rain and cold. Of course, this is Colorado, and weather reports always lie. It's a beautiful day today. That figures. I'll try again in late April or early May. I'm getting close on pose estimation. That's the last piece of the navigation puzzle, then it's on to obstacle detection and avoidance.

Meanwhile I headed down to Club Workshop for the Automate Denver! event which was moved to Saturday.

Violet and I saw a variety of cool robots including a dancing humanoid, a giant, wicked-looking AVC robot, a cool remote controlled ball called a Sphero from Orbotics, the Gamma Two Robotics sentry robot, and some others. Here are some pictures...

Dancing Humanoids

I hope this thing doesn't run over Data Bus!

FIRST Robotics Challenge Team 3200's hoop-shooter

Line follower using vision system on a laptop

I displayed Data Bus

The AVC entry features a 1/5 scale RC crawler with all aluminum chassis, dual 550-sized brushless motors, a Maxbotics sonar ranger, and a PC to power the RoboRealm vision system.

GPS? IMU? Nope. The designers are planning to use vision alone for navigation. Wow. Unfortunately they aren't registered and aren't even on the waiting list. Bummer.

On the other hand, the robot weighs 10 times as much as Data Bus and if it rolled over my poor yellow robot that'd be the end.