Third Preliminary Mission, something beyond Murphy’s law

Today at 9:30 am we had the third team leader meeting in which Adam talked about the results of his last session (at last night) with executive and technical committees of Rescue Robot League. The most important one is that “The teams are allowed to only request TEAM RESET NOT ROBOT RESET”! This means if ONE of a group of your robots needs reset, you should return ALL the robots to the start point! So the multi-robot teams (almost all teams) won’t be able to request reset if their autonomous robot(s) doesn’t go where they supposed to go – this technique is widely used by multi-robot teams like us. Anyway, our third mission was a very disappointing end to our preliminaries. Since we didn’t score any victim in our previous missions, we had to find around 4 victims. So we decided to climb up a very steep staircase having two victims (most teams refused to go there). BETA climbed up it perfectly but at the final step, Mehdi a little bit turned the flippers which led to flipping over from a 1.5m height!!! Mehdi intelligently could flip back the robot using its flippers but Alireza (Amini) informed me about the smell of smoke around the robot. I asked reset and we understood the powering system of our robot is badly damaged! As a result we missed the general competitions and we should only concentrate on the best of class missions. Hopefully we’ll have a better chance in remaining days!

Second Preliminary Mission

I’m awfully sorry to say that our second mission was a big loss due to my mistake as the team leader!!! After the problem we faced in the previous mission I asked the electronics guys to change our currently installed video server (from Planet Co.) with the other one that we were using since last year (from MOXA Co.). We had only three hours and I accepted the risk of changing the system in a short time. As I predicted the guys could change the device properly but unfortunately we realized that our video server badly blurs the video streams. Honestly I still don’t know how our operator could drive the robot to the first victim location using these noisy videos. Unfortunately the referee didn’t accept any found victim due to very noisy pictures! I’m awfully sorry for my wrong decision :’-(

First Preliminary Mission

As we scheduled last night, all the members woke up at 6 am to reach to the competition venue early after the opening time (7 am). After a 10 min walk to the Suntec we started to test the problem of servos. Unluckily not only we couldn’t fix the problem but also we lost the video stream sent from BETA. When I was deciding to cancel our first mission, Mehdi (Soltanzadeh) found out what the problem is – our usb interfaced relay module that switches the videos had decided to use another serial port!!!
Finally we started our mission but we couldn’t score any victim due to the considerable delay in video streaming :-(

Second Setup Day

Today we tested BETA and fixed some electromechanical problems that unexpectedly occurred during the tests. At 12 pm the first team leader meeting was held (with about 2 hours delay). Adam Jacof and Ann Virst as representatives of organizing committee talked about the new rules and answered the questions. As I predicted, some of the previously proposed rules won’t be completely applied this year (as an instance it’s allowed to merge individual maps manually). The committee also informed about assigning an extra 25 points (half of a victim’s complete score) to each mission in which one of the team members explains to the audience what their robots do (or supposed to do); this wasn’t announced before! During this meeting the schedule of Rescue Robot League (which is listed hereunder) was also given:
- Preliminary: Monday and Tuesday (2 missions per day each one should be done in 15 min.)
- Semi-final: Wednesday (2 missions and 25 min. for each mission)
- Final: Thursday (only one 25 min. mission)
- Best in class: Thursday
At the end of the session team leaders randomly selected when their missions will be on tomorrow. I guess we had a good chance since one of our missions will be at 10 am (in arena A) and the other one at 3 pm (in arena B). At the time of writing, we noticed that the servos located on BETA moves strangely but we have no more time to stay at the competition venue (it’s 11 pm and the lights will go off in a minute). I hope we’ll be able to fix the bug before starting our first mission!

DELTA is fixed

After unpacking our luggage, the team is divided to two subgroups: the first group inspecting BETA (the tele-operated robot) and the second one fixing the aforementioned mechanical problem of DELTA (the autonomous robot). Not surprisingly, nothing was damaged inside our custom made aluminum boxes and we just checked the electronics. At the time of writing this post GAMMA is fixed though we haven’t check it’s performance in the arena.

Unpacking

I got the ID cards of our Iranian sub-group but I couldn’t do it for the Malaysian ones due to a problem with registration process. So, I came to the Rescue field (located at 4th floor of Suntec Exhibition Center) and Sharifah Azizah is following up the problem. Here the airport custom agent delivered our robots and toolboxes at 11 am and now we’re unpacking our luggage to see if everything is OK.

Receiving a new motherboard

This morning I met Sharifah Azizah, the team manager of our Malaysian sub-group that received to Singapore last night. She brought us another military/industry grade motherboard that we use in our robots (we experienced some strange problems with the motherboard of BETA before leaving Iran and I thought we should have a reserve). After the breakfast we will go to the competition venue to get our ID cards and the robots.