The second annual Society of Monash Electrical Engineers Robot Building Competition saw about 150 competitors spend a weekend building robots to solve a specific challenge. Their robots needed to follow a line down a track, detect when they approached a gate, sense the colour of the gate, transmit that colour to the course control computer using an RF transmitter module, wait for the gate to be opened, proceed to the next gate, and repeat until they reached the finish line. The finish line is a line across the track that matches the colour of the last gate, so they also had to detect multiple cross lines and ignore the ones that were the wrong colour.
The challenge turned out to be too complicated to complete within the time allowed, so it was simplified a little during the competition.
Freetronics was a major sponsor of the competition, providing prize packs for the first 4 place teams plus a bonus prize pack for a “best bling” category judged by me purely on who made the coolest looking robot.
