We are officially registered for the 2012 FLL Season. You can learn more about First Lego League, form and register a team with friends.
The field set for the robot game arrives early August 2012.
Team FLL kickoff event planned for August 25, 2012 at 2pm in the team lab. Model Scout Robotics is FLL Team #4934 in 2012. We are really excited about the upcoming Senior Solutions FLL season!
Model Scout Robotics will celebrate Moon Day on Saturday July 21st 2012 at the Frontiers of Flight Museum at Love Field Airport. You can find us at the Circle 10 Council Boy Scout booth at the event. Here’s the event flyer if you want to come: Moon Day 2012 at Frontiers of Flight Museum
We will be showing some of our robotic creations, telling other kids how to get started in robotics and showing our entry in the Moonbots 2012 competition. The Circle 10 booth is also showing BSA’s new STEM NOVA awards for Cub, Boy Scouts and Venturer scouts. Robotics is one of the award’s concentration areas.
Of course, the team will check out the other cool booths. Moonbots has put us in Astronomy and Space Exploration mode.
It was a long but productive team meeting today.
Matthew demoed his new monorail robot – it does a great job of climbing a staircase bannister. Not what our coach probably had in mind for a stairclimber but its cool and creative.
We finished the script for our Google Moonbots video and shot footage of the team with green screen on camera. Will review team videos from coach library for clips to add in the team section for the video. We need more wow factor in the video ending.
For background music, music from Stargate or Star Trek is not going to happen. You Tube might delete our video if the background music is copyrighted and violates “fair use copyright law”. Looking for license free background music.
The team built the lunar base from last meeting for use in our video. We found most of what we needed from other Lego models around Matthew’s house so the build did not take long. Need to film the base progression sequence tomorrow and switch to background clips on real lunar robots that do not have copyright issues. Will switch from SpaceX to Dragon rockets in title sequence.
At end of today’s team meeting, we watched a short video on the upcoming Curiosity robotic rover landing on Mars called “Challenges of Getting to Mars: Zero Margin of Error” available on YouTube. We discussed the engineering challenges, the meaning of zero margin of error and its ramifications. The pictures of Curiosity on JPL’s web site show what looks to be the most sophisticated real robot we have seen.
Curiosity is scheduled to land on Mars on August 6th, 2012 at 12:30am CDT. Coverage of the event is planned on the NASA JPL channel. Mark your calendar and set an alarm.
We designed a lunar base for robot explorers (and humans) at our team meeting today.
We also designed on paper our Ultimate Lunar Landscape draft for our MoonBots entry. Coach showed us the basic rule requirements. We want our entry to reflect real world planned missions so we reviewed mission in the Google Lunar X Prize. Checked out Team Astrobotics plans (our sponsor is a fan of Dr Red Whittaker’s robotic wonders) . Sponsor recommended checking our NASA JPL site for ideas too. Also brainstormed about some challenge tasks for a robot game based on the moon so our planned landscape can support. Coach reminded us that we don’t need much info on mission or mission elements until Phase II. Just need enough info to plan a board that gives us challenge opportunities.
If our missions reflect NASA and other nations real planned or executed missions this would help us educate other kids. We need cool but doable missions for wow factor in Phase II.
Now that our scouts are back from camp and vacation, we are switching focus of team meetings to robotics and astronomy. Our next Lego NXT Mindstorms based competition is MoonBots. Phase I entry is due July 15, 2012.
Model Scout Matthew spent the week at the Lego Mindstorms Robotics Day Camp offered by University of Texas at Dallas (UTD). The program has a well equipped lab for students working with Mindstorms projects. Dr. Kenneth Berry’s team staffs the camp.
Matthew had a great time. He worked on several challenges. His favorite project was building a remote control truck with 2 NXT bricks communicating via Bluetooth.
More information on UTD SEEC camps, can be found here: http://www.utdallas.edu/seec/RoboticsSummerCamps.html
Matthew leaves tomorrow for his first boy scout summer camp.
Model Scout Matthew and our team sponsor met two Eagle Scout alums of Troop 219 at a scouting event today who have cool jobs. They build giant Animatronic Dinosaurs for museums. They invited Model Scouts on a tour of their factory in McKinney TX. That sounds like fun!
On May 12, 2012, team members Matthew Thomas and Anthony Mellone placed first and second in the Junior Level Line Following contest at the Dallas Personal Robotics Group (DPRG) Roborama 2012a competition.
For the Line Following contest, robots had to successfully make two laps around a course indicated by black electrical tape on white vinyl tile. Matthew’s robot (“Heinz Doofenbot”) completed 2 laps of the course in 75 seconds; Anthony’s robot (“Subatomic Fusion”) had difficulty with one of the sharper curves but still earned second place. Both Matthew and Anthony received gift certificates to mindsensors.com and Tanner Electronics for their entries.
Below is a video of Matthew’s winning run. You can also see other videos of Model Scouts robots at Roborama 2012a, the full Roborama 2012a video playlist, and other pictures from the event.
Coach Patrick also entered some events at Roborama. We’re all looking forward to the next DPRG contest!
Team Model Scouts setup and ran two stations on robotics at Pack 79’s meeting on May 5th. We ran a station on First Lego League Robot Game. We also ran a station on robotic gadgets, robotic line following, sensors and attachments. Everything ran well except our HiTec compass sensor. It was not working reliably. We suspect the iron rebar in the concrete floor interfered with the sensor.
