grep Chelo

Today I got to do some Lego Mindstorms NXT programming. With a couple of friends, Danny and Dave, I entered a Lego robot contest at our workplace, NI (National Instruments, for those who are not familiar with it). This week we have an awesome series of conferences presented by employees for employees. We get to talk about our new products and projects to other people in the company, share our ideas for the future and show off some cool demos. It’s also a time to eat pizza and have beer.

And of course, no engineering event would be complete without some robotic influence. The idea is to program your robot in 2 hours for a challenge you’ve never seen before. This year the objective is to race across a field filled with pegs that block your way. No remote control is allowed, so your robot needs to be able to maneuver on its own. Essentially, yours needs to be the fastest robot to reach the goal-line.

So, this was the first stage, the programming and debugging one. The actual competition is on Thursday, when we’ll see for real how effective our design was. For now, we’re pretty confident we did a good job. Our fastest time was 36 seconds, when most of the robots were doing over a minute

We’ll see how it goes, in the meantime, I leave you a couple pics from today’s stage.