I am member of the ERC (ESAIP Robotic Club). This is a club which has been created in 2002 by a group of students from the ESAIP.
The ESAIP - "Ecole Supérieure Angevine d'Informatique et de Productique" - is a French Engineering school in the West of France. ESAIP's website (in French).
This club has been created to take part in the annual French robotic cup which opposes teams from a lot of engineering school and also clubs. This competition takes places every year in La Ferté-Bernard (close to the city "Le Mans" in France) with a new challenge each year.
Where the competition takes place:
The ERC's Team:
(No, I'm not on this photo. I was in front of them with another member
next to the competition's table to prepare and start the robot)
And here is our robot!
This year the goal of the competition for the
robots was to put the maximum numbers of pucks with the color they
defended (red or green) on the top. It is important to note that the
robots had to do this in a completely autonomous way!
We have used a CMUcam to detect the pucks and ultra-sonic sensors
to avoid the borders of the ground and move towards pucks which where
near the robot.
A 68HC11 was used to control the robot's internal mechanism responsible
for turning (or not) the pucks from one side to the other. The
Evaluator-7T was used to get data from the CMUcam & ultra-sonic
sensors and controlling the two poor servo-motors driving our robot
using the collected data. Needless to say that ISOS worked perfectly
running those tasks in different threads.
We have finished 50th from 189 teams present, which is not bad
considering that this is our first participation and that we had a
smaller budget than most of the other teams!
We also managed to have a 2 minutes report made about us by a local
television channel, which will obviously help us finding new sponsors
for next year!
You can download the video here
(9.22 MB, DivX).
And yes, the video is in French... but you can still see the robot
running even if you don't speak French.
© 2003 Wilhem Meignan.