Robotour 2010 results

The competition moved further east and took place in Botanic Garden in the city Bratislava/Slovakia. The comment from last year holds for this year again: "it was the most difficult year so far". There were 19 registered teams as last year, but only fifteen teams homologated and competed. We were very happy to welcome several new teams: namely Brmlab, Odysseus and Smelý Zajko.

The beginning of the contest was rather chaotic. Within a half an hour it was necessary to inform 15 teams and 15 judges about latest details, to distribute and to make 15 VTU10 tracking units work, to align 15 robots on the start, to give everybody coordinates 10 minutes before start … as I write this, it could not end up without problem. We should learn from this and have training zero round (without scoring) instead.

The first evaluated round started at 11am. The start area was defined for each robot by partially filled PET bottles, labeled with the team name. Two minutes before the start judges took these bottles and carry them, while the robot autonomously navigated, to place where the robot finished. This way judges did not forget to switch off tracking unit, and it was clear where exactly the robot ended. The goal position was distributed on pre-printed leaflets at 10:50. Finally this and other critical times 10:58 (clearance of people), 10:59 (nobody near robots), and 11:00 (START) were signalized by whistle.

This round was all right from the organization point of view, but there were surely some unwanted details. Two robots started too early and were disqualified. Oddysseus expected that clearance of people is the last minute and LOko of Radioklub Písek started 11s sooner due to wrong time of the control computer (within last 4 hours it shifted by 25 seconds).

The second round started in the middle of the garden, and the goal was approximately 200m to the left. The road was narrower but for majority of robots easily recognizable. One of the problem was that the robots had to go first further away from the goal. So most of the robots got zero points even though they traveled tens of meters. Eduro and robot Vektor of team Robozor went to visit green house, Tatran Team freely continued straight to flowerbed of summer flowers so the only robot which scored this time was a big Roboauto — it correctly turned on the junction and it got closer to target by 11 meters. The only other scoring robots were those, that simply crossed the start road in perpendicular direction and left it on the other side, closer to goal.

The third round was probably the most difficult. It started on a road approximately 2 meters wide (in OSM map was tag width set to 3 meters), and continued uphill. A half of the road was very rough (due to roots of a big tree) in approximately 20 meters, not passable for the most robots. This tree root also terminated a try of of CGS Robotics, which stopped there with bumpers in contact, and shortly after this accident broke gearbox of their P3-AT. Eduro after many back-and-forth dances passed but wrongly turned to parking lot near summer altan. Probably the most satisfied was this time team Short Circuits, which slalom between robots and got 43m towards the goal.

There was extra round at the end, which should compensate for the first try. Radioklub Písek was the most satisfied team this time, whose LOkotka robot tactically started to move nine minutes after official start and moved among wracks of robots to narrow uphill road and got 65 meters.

(*) Tatran Team Trenčín and Radioklub Písek carried full barrel, so the total difference was 2 meters and thus below the measurement precision. This was the reason why we decided to merge these two places.

This year rules were in several important aspects very different from previous years. First of all the interaction between robots occurred quite often thanks to concurrent start. Also the ability of robot to deal with environment changes and navigate with inaccurate map was very important.

Our conclusion is that this was a step in the right direction, so the rules for year 2011 should be quite similar to this year. There are some plans about different time limits for robot on start, solution for active road blocking by robot and maybe requirement for planner, from which we expect better mapping of extra attributes in openstreetmap.

Robotour 2011 will take place in autum 2011 in Vienna/Austria, and it will be probably organized together with conference Robotics In Education.

Smelý Zajko

Eduro

Radioklub Písek

If you consider this contest interesting and you would like to participate next year, please let us know via contact form.