Video: LVBots August 2015 mini-sumo competition

Posted by Ryan on 8 September 2015
Tags: lvbots

LVBots held a mini-sumo competition at Pololu on August 20. The goal of mini-sumo is to make an autonomous robot that pushes the other robot out of a 30″ ring, but this is not BattleBots: the robots cannot be controlled by a human, and they are not supposed to damage one another. Eighteen robots faced off in our head-to-head double elimination tournament. The video above shows some of the more entertaining matches and the full results of the contest.

The robots have become more sophisticated since our previous mini-sumo competition. Our new Zumo 32U4 Robot, which came out in the meantime, improves on the Zumo Robot for Arduino by adding IR sensors and encoders. This allowed some entries to do well just by programming a Zumo 32U4 robot (for example David’s Zumo Red). Also, people generally have gotten better at fabricating and programming their robots. Some people used 3D CAD programs to design 3D-printed and laser-cut chassis.

Kevin’s Roku won the competition, with the consensus being that Kevin won because he did not have enough time to make a gimmicky robot (like his line following hovercraft). His compact design used our new A-Star 32U4 robot controller and Sharp GP2Y0A60SZ 10 to 150 cm analog distance sensors, which kept the wiring minimal and the sight range long. Ben’s robot, The Big Ben, was unchanged since competing in the previous contest, yet it managed to do much better this time around, taking second place (though Brian was operating the robot in Ben’s absence, so he might want to claim some of the credit). Paul’s reigning champion, Paul Sumo 2, took third place despite also remaining unchanged since the last competition.

Update: Here are posts about some of the robots in the contest:

Are you in the Las Vegas area? Check out the LVBots Meetup page to get involved.

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