Adventures in Robotics

I’m in my Senior year at Graceland University, and this year I’m president of our ACM chapter. Each year we travel to several different conferences, and for the last several years we have been traveling to the Midwest Instruction and Computing Symposium or MICS. Part of the conference each year is a Robotics competition. In 2011, about 26 teams of 2-3 students worked on a problem that involved traversing a maze built of black tiles and white tape walls. Brian Anders and I had never competed in robotics competition, but decided to put together a solution. We ended up taking home second place! The video following illustrates:

The source code for this solution can be found on my github. The reason this comes to mind is because we are competing again tomorrow. I don’t want to give out too many details on the competition or our solution before the competition is over, but here is a video to tide you over:

Expect a follow up with all kinds of goodies about the competition Friday.