A huge crowd gathers to watch the
500g sumo robot final round.
“ERP” shows off
before taking
home a gold and
silver medal.
A Participant’s Perspective:
RoboGames 2009 (held June 12-14)
By Camp Peavy
Turning into the Ft. Mason Center early Saturday
morning, it seemed odd there were only a handful of the
usual suspects standing around. The previous night’s
builder’s party went long. Hmm ... Well, the games don’t
start ‘til 10 and everyone knows roboticists do their best
work in real time (i.e., at the last minute) and besides, it’s
San Francisco! The six of us could have gone on forever
with stories of robots past and present; stories which get
better with each re-telling. And, at least I wasn’t late this
time. Soon the Brazilian team — Starbucks in tow — arrived,
as well as many others of the “best minds from around the
world.” I unloaded my trusty Burning Man ArtBot “Springy
Thingy” which has survived not only six burns but has been
to every RoboGames so far — even won silver in 2005. I led
her into the pavilion with an IR “Chew Toy” and before I
knew it, we were transported into the robotic universe
known as “RoboGames.”
I set up my homebrewed menagerie next to my longtime combot buddy Steve Nelson and his heavyweight
kinetic ArtBot “Ethel was a Tree.” Later in the day Steve
would send Ethel to the concession stand with $2 and a
note requesting a “Brawndo” (as seen in Idiocracy) and it
worked! Technically, I had only one RoboGames entry
“Homer the Homebrewed Humanoid” in the kinetic ArtBot
but there was only one entry in Tabletop Navigation so
Alpha Dog “Calkins” asked if I could arrange some kind of
competition. Fortunately, my TABLEBots “Timmay” and
“Dusty” were up for the challenge.
62 SERVO 08.2009
Turns out the one entry was a block-throwing TABLEBot
by John Palmisano out of Kenner, LA. His robot “E.R.P.”
(Experimental Robot Platform) would analyze the table with
a Blackfin-based camera, find and pick up the block, and
throw it into the box mounted at the end of the table.
Instant gold medal! You see Timmay just pushes the block
into the box (on a good day) and Dusty was only “Phase I.”
In Tabletop Navigation, there are three levels or phases:
“Phase I” simply goes from one end of the table to the
other. “Phase II” pushes a randomly placed block off of the
table, and “Phase III” moves the block into a shoebox
mounted at the end of the table.
On the other side of my homebrewed table was the
“Fire House” staffed mostly by Homebrew Robotics Club
(HBRC) members including Bob and Cory Allen (Team
Viper), Ted Larson (OLogic), Rose and Michael Cipriano
(Zanybots), and, of course, the Pratkanis family starring
“Tony Pratkanis” who is obsessed with ants and has built
many ant-like robots over the years — including three-time
RoboGames gold medal winner “Solenopsis Invicta” (Fire
Ant) who unfortunately died earlier in the week due to a
microcontroller failure.
This year, “Agus mulyana” and “Akbar Alexander” from
Indonesia took the gold with a Tarantula-legged robot
called “NEXT-116.” It could even stomp over the miniature
stairs. The neat little “Green Machine Reloaded” took silver
and Tony tied for bronze with his new fire-fighting machine
“Solenopsis Geminata” with “Gilberto Bravo” and the little
red robot “TITO.”
On Sunday, I judged the RoboMagellan event up the
great stairs to the “Great Meadow.” RoboMagellan is an
