Gadgetory

it's kind of like double dare but with robots welcome to the Caltech Rob's tickle course five teams composed of Caltech Mechanical Engineering students competed in this annual tradition where robots go head-to-head in a series of challenges this year's theme an obstacle course every year with this course we come up with a completely different set of tasks it's a completely different game the teams learn what the robots have to be able to do at the beginning of the year and then spend months prototyping and refining their final designs we got like basic ideas for the designs about 20 weeks ago when this class started we've actually been changing the designs quite a bit throughout this entire 20 weeks that we had everything finalized about a couple of weeks ago honestly then we built everything I've been testing solidly for about a week maybe a bit less the finished product isn't just a reflection of the students knowledge it's also an important team-building experience when teams meet team has to begin to form storm as they constructively confront each other through what ideas are going to be the ones that they actually go forward with then they begin to norm and that's when the vectors are not perfectly aligned but becoming a lot more aligned and ultimately they perform if they've gone through those four phases of teamwork this year's course required teams to build three robots designed to complete a kind of relay race the first uses self-driving technology to autonomously navigate a field of pylons and pass a baseball over to the next robot the second robot speeds up a seesaw and down the other side and then over a second stationary ramp or the third robot waits for the ball handoff after the third robot gets the baton it uses magnets to release bolts on a gate drive through it and then deposit the ball into the goal each team tackled the course multiple times repairing and tweaking their robots between runs the pathway there's pretty bumpy so as we drive over it be robots just vibrate a lot and so all the screws come loose before our last two matches I like secured all the wires as to make sure that like that would happen again and then we had smooth sailing from them even though team Vista took the championship the process itself aims to teach each team member valuable life skills they can put into action no matter what they choose to do after graduation that's what you want to hire you want to hire people that when the stress is high when the pressures on those are the those are the cool heads in the room I always tell them this is your last big reliability test