PARC gave a full-day, hands-on
tutorial at
IROS 2003. There were 12 participants, from Japan,
Europe and the US, whose jobs ranged from managers to graduate students, from
academia and industry. Most had no previous experience with any
kind of modular robot. (click for tutorial)
Participants were initially split into six
pairs. The first task for these groups was to create and program a
robot to compete in a race, the winner of which was to the fastest
forward moving robot.
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Each group created a unique design, including
fast waveform snakes, frog-like gaits, sidewinding snakes and a very
novel flipping/rolling gait. Even though there was only one winner,
each was quite creative and interesting — with many of gaits created
novel even to the inventors of PolyBot. In creating these gaits, the
students used phase automata, posable programming and a variety of
passive pieces.
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The final competition was conducted between two groups of six.
Since the venue for IROS 2003 was in Las Vegas, the task was to
create a robot that could gamble! This involved a very challenging
set of tasks: walking up to a toy slot machine, placing a poker chip
into it, depressing a lever, and finally catching the winnings
(ejected poker chips) in a cup. The winner was to be the group whose
robot collects the most chips. Participants were able to use the
advanced features of PolyKinetic™, such as control user interfaces for
teleoperation and parameters. One group completed a very complicated
design within only two hours. In the final demonstration
they were able to do almost all the tasks, only barely missing the
chips as they were ejected from the toy slot machine.
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Copyright (c) Palo
Alto Research Center Incorporated. All Rights Reserved.
Last updated June. 2004
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