Agrotech 3.0

Agrotech 3.0 event Logo

   A few months ago, I was lucky enough to be picked to be a participant at an international engineering event organised by BEST Madrid.

   The BEST group is a europeean group made out of students that organise a lot of activities across major cities around the old continent. 

   The event at which I had participated took place in Madrid, at the Polytechnical University of Madrid.

   

    The event consisted in making a robot which gathered solar and wind energy as effieciently as possible. In order to build our robot we had to use parts from LEGO Mindstorms. We could only use a maximum of two NXT Intelligent Bricks, two ultrasonic sensors, and as many light, touch and sound sensors as we wanted.

NXT Intelligent Brick

Light sensor

Ultrasonic sensor

Sound sensor

Touch sensor

 
   Our robots also had to be equipped with an Energy meter that was connected to the solar panel and to the wind-driven motor.

Energy meter with battery, connected to a Mindstorms solar panel

   The robots had to travel autonomously on a three level course with ramps connecting each level, carefully avoiding clifs and holes. Also, on every level there was a patch of grass that the robots should have detected and consider the area between patches of grass as being a road.


    The robots had to avoid obstacles, detect the position of the energy source and move twoards it and try to find the optimum position for charging. After finding that position they had to be able to adapt if the position of the energy source was changed and to find again the optimum spot. While in that optimum spot, the robots had to charge for 90 seconds and then move on to find the next source.


   The course was layed out so that on the second level there was a fan that was the wind energy source and on the third level there was a light projector as the light source.


   The winning robot was the one who could charge the energy-meter the most, had the smallest weight and was the "most atonomous" (the one that didn't require to be moved or changed by hand).


   Me and my team (Andrea Zsohár, Alexopoulou Vicky, Miguel Laguens Vega) have built and programmed the robot using the LEJOS framework and programming in Java. Our little robot was called RoboJamón and he did a really nice job on the course. 

The team

Deploying the robot

Moving forward to find energy

It's working great!

Charging with solar and wind energy

There's a little problem with stopping the robot...

    He had only a few problems while finding the optimum spot to charge with energy (because we didn't set the threshold high enough). It was a fantastic experience and a great opportunity to work with a NEW and FUN technology.


   Thank you again to the BEST team in Madrid for the course and the opportunity that they gave us, to LEARN and to HAVE FUN. I highly recommend to any student that studies in Europe to look for his closest BEST group and apply for the next Agrotech course or for any other course.


   Courses are organised once every season (spring, summer, autumn and winter) and you only have to pay the transportation to the location of the event. Everything else is covered by the organisers.

   In the end I will post the official video of the event with a few of the most important moments in the competition. I hope you enjoyed this post and I have made you curious about the BEST oportunities!

 

   Please feel free to leave any comments on this post, to rate it and share it with the world. I'll be back later with more interesting and funny things about the Engineering world!

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