RoboCup Success

We’ve visited the RoboCup German Open 2018 held in Magdeburg, Germany, that is the only european round of RoboCup Major Rescue League.

Our latest robot called “R18”, is similar to the last two years competition robots, but it’s built from ground up, and we’ve made a lot of enhancements along the way:
– the arm is more precise, lighter, stronger, longer and it has a larger workspace (at the same time!)
– we’re using more cameras, more viewpoints, with better image quality, and we’ve reduced the network bandwidth when driving
– cleanup of the upper deck resulted in more free space for the arm, and the height of the robot is reduced
– onboard processing power increased
– lower total weight
– wheels got more grip and they are more durable now
– multiple operator helper / automatic features
– little tricks here and there
– more aesthetically pleasing appearance

We’ve spent a lot of energy on the development, and it worth it, as Team Rescube scored:
– Best in Class Mobility: 1st place
– Best in Class Dexterity: 1st place
– Best in Class Small Size Robot: 1st place
– Overall Rescue League: 2nd place

RoboCup Awards

Lots of Awards

Out Robot worked flawlessly from day one, reliably scored points even on the most challenging terrains and during the most complex dexterity tasks. The whole week went down without repair!

The success of our small delegation – Zoltan Abonyi, Matyas Borvendeg and Peter Kopias – of course is built on the work, help and support of our friends, family and team members still in Hungary, or around the world. Thank you for your enthusiasm and efforts!

We’d like to thank AccessPoint Kft. for the reliable wireless network solution they provided, Tamás Sándor’s help so that Óbudai University Kandó Kálmán Faculty of Electrical Engineering supported our travel, and Götz Kft. helped us in gathering the perfect materials in the last minute!

Here’s the short summary video we’ve compiled, showing the robot on simple, and more challenging terrains and solving the dexterity tasks:

Oh, and here’s a surprise link to the World Robot Summit with a Disaster Recovery robot competition to be held in Tokyo this October. Watashi wa hotondo nihongo o hanasemasen.

Custom electronics

Our new PCB panels have arrived!

Printed circuit boards before assembly

Printed circuit boards before assembly

The boards:
– Integrated Arm Controller (top left): contains motor controllers, encoder inputs and an ARM Cortex M4 microcontroller, that handles the arm and gripper movements
– Body shield (top right): this panel is an extension board that connects the body devices to the body microcontroller. Features include: I2C for accel/gyro/magnetometer, CO2 sensor, 4 wheel motor control, spine length control and battery monitoring.
– custom USB HID device (bottom left): featuring 15 analog, 1 encoder, 32 digital channels, with integrated microcontroller
– head distributor board (bottom right): this panel contains a switching power supply for the gripper motors, a servo hub and a USB hub in a compact form factor.

Hope to get all these working next weekend, and get the new arm and body platform started.

The RoboCup German Open has ended with fantastic results!

Sunday afternoon the RoboCup German Open has ended; let us announce you with great pride that Rescube Robotics’ performance was again well beyond expectations: we have fantastic results. Let us see:

  • at the main competition, the Rescue Robot League we have reached the 2nd place among the six teams
  • at the sub-contest for the most dexterous robots (Best-in-Class Dexterity) we have won the 1st prize
  • and finally at the sub-contest for the most mobile robots (Best-in-Class Mobility) we have taken the 2nd place.

We are now very proud and happy, and also the result of the main competition has now officially qualified us to enter the 2017 RoboCup World Championship in July in Nagoya, Japan.

We are on the way back home, will get beck to you soon with photos and details!

We have had excellent preliminaries on RoboCup German Open

As you may know, the entrance for the RoboCup world championship leads through the European (German) qualification round, the RoboCup German Open. We have been in Magdeburg since Tuesday and we are proud to announce that based on the preliminaries held on Friday and Saturday we are currently ranked second out of the six teams. We seem to have a though Sunday: besides the main competition we are going to battle for the Best-in-class Mobility and Best-in-class Dexterity titles as well.

We will get back to you tomorrow with the final results and lots of photos – until that here is the official group photo of the contest:

We have won FLIR’s December Maker Contest!

As we have mentioned in our prior blogpost, we have submitted our project to the FLIR maker community showcase.

Let us proudly announce that we have won the December Maker Contest! It is a great honor that our project was recognized by the global leading company in thermal imaging and our robot is now being featured in the company’s website.

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We’re on the Flir Developer Community page

As some of you might already know, we’ve started using the FLIR Lepton sensors early on in the end of 2014.

These thermal sensors were the first to have accessible prices, and their small size make them especially fit for smaller robotics projects.

Today these sensors are available not just as phone peripherals, but the Cat S60 phone already has the thermal camera built in.

A few days ago the Rescube Robot got presented the FLIR developer community page: https://lepton.flir.com/community-showcase-items/robocup-rescue-league-robot/

Hope to get FLIR onboard on our 2017 RoboCup Rescube League robot.

A gift from our friend Peter

We’re very proud to present you this gift we received from our #1 fan, Peter Domonkos!

This led display is one of a kind, handcrafted plexiglas with a 3d printed base.

Can you believe, that this IoT device has wifi connection via an ESP8266 module, and you can set the colors through a REST API? It’s absolutely mindblowing.

This gift is the result of hours of dedicated work, that means very much to the whole team!

Hope to see you in Debrecen this weekend!

Researchers’ Night 2016

We had a real great evening at this year’s Researchers’ Night. It was a fantastic experience to meet hundreds of zealous youngsters from preschoolers to university students. Ericsson Hungary has invited countless number of interesting exhibitors and there were so many visitors that sometimes the carbon-dioxide sensor on our robot showed us a serious increase in the concentration…

We would like to express our gratitude towards the Hungarian Robot Builders Association for kindly inviting us to this super-exciting event.

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