Bitcoin documentary trailer for amylase
15 comments
Kada ir vertiba 1 bitcoin sodien
Was it our robot-building skills? We build mindstorm stuff maybe hours per YEAR. Was it our coding skills? We do have experience coding. Was it because we the adults work at Lego?
A clear goal, a bit of research, and lots of integration testing! First we set a goal. Nevertheless, I convinced them to start in small steps. We knew nothing about these kind of competitions so we started by looking at some youtube clips to see what kind of designs and strategies people were using.
That gave us some ideas. We had our candidate! Time to train him up. The original SmartBot was gradually stripped of sensors and stuff and became DummyBot — our training dummy. Not just once, but repeatedly. So we went through a bunch of cycles of integration testing and tweaking the hardware and software. We kept failing over and over often in funny ways , but every iteration we got a bit closer to winning.
One interesting thing happened along the way. We noticed on the youtube clips that many robots tried to lift and topple their enemies. So Dave built a pretty elaborate construction for that, and I helped write the code to control the lifter.
In theory it was awesome, in practice it was useless. We wanted to keep Robit simple and focused on one thing — putting up a proper fight!
We figured that would help us get under the wheels and push or topple the opponent. Nothing unique, most robots have something like that in the front. However it was hard to get the right angle of attack. So the software needed some work. A simple algorithm that turned out to generate a pretty advanced behaviour!
We were four people in the team — Dave and Jenny, me, and Lars. As for my role, well, it was mostly coaching. I did end up writing most of the code, but that was in tight collaboration with the kids.
The big learning for me is how incredibly important and powerful it is to iterate fast! And to do end-to-end integration testing early and often. The usual agile stuff in other words. So when Robit entered the arena he was already an experienced battle-scarred combatant! Initially I was hesitant to give it away, since we might compete again. Woooow, soooooo fun to read about this.
It must be times more fun to do this with your own kids and get some of their energy. I remember mentoring 4th year engineering teams building robots that would navigate a maze and put out a candle. The simplest algorithm and approaches generally won; the more complicated approaches generally broke down fairly quickly.
Wow I had no idea it was this new and this involved — Jenny and David were awesome and I just assumed they had been doing it for years! Your email address will not be published. Crisp's Blog from the Crisp Consultants. Posted on by Henrik Kniberg. Tags conference , gotocph , kids , robots.
Subscribe to comments via RSS. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published.