It started with a Robotics Club I started in high school
I started a robotics club in high school where we would learn about 3D printing, CAD, and programming. We were fortunate enough to have 2 3D printers, as well as a dedicated space to work on our projects. We would meet almost every day during lunch and after school to work on our projects.
The First Tech Challenge
We were lucky enough to have an amazing librarian who was also our mentor. She was able to help us get into the First Tech Challenge. As soon as we heard about the competition we were all in. We spent countless hours after school and on weekends working on our robot. During the competition there was a fully autonomous portion where the robot had to detect and pick up blocks and place them in a specific area as well as a controlled portion.
The Physical Design
We designed our robot to be as simple as possible. I had the idea to mount the robotic arm to grab the blocks on the side of the robot. This allowed us to not have to turn the robot to pick up the blocks. One problem we had was that the robot arm was too heavy and would tip the robot over. We were able to solve this by adding a counterweight other side of the robot.
Software Magic
Looking back, other teams had incredibly complex block detection algorithms utilizing machine learning and computer vision with phones mounted on their robots. I worked on the software to detect the blocks and was able to come up with a simple but efficient algorithm to detect the blocks. One of the sensors I had access to was a color sensor. It was able to detect red, green and blue. Since the blocks were yellow I created a simple algorithm to detect the yellow blocks.
This algorithm looked something like this:
yellow = (red^2 + green^2) / blue^2
This simple algorithm was able to detect the yellow blocks with a high degree of accuracy. Due to our creative design and simple but efficient color detection algorithm our team won the Collins Aerospace Innovation Award at the competition.
Software Utilized
