Earlier in April we took Super Mega Microbot out to California to compete in Mech Warfare during Robogames 2016. Thanks to the R-TEAM organizers who made the event happen this year. We were really excited, and the event as a whole went off really well! There were a lot of functional mechs attending, and many fights that were exciting to watch.
We managed to play 5 official matches, in the double elimination tournament, finishing in 3rd place overall. When it worked, SMMB worked really well. Our first loss was a very close battle, the score keeping system had us winning by 2 and the judges had us losing by 2. (The scoring system wasn’t super reliable, so there were human judges calling hits). Our second loss was caused when the odroid’s USB bus on SMMB stopped working mid-match, causing us to lose camera and wifi.
Takeaways
Since our last matches, we tried to improve a number of things, while some worked, not all of them are entirely successful yet:
- Faster walking: The new mammal chassis is about twice as fast as the old lizard one, but we didn’t get much time to make it work really well, so we were still one of the slower mechs at Robogames. Also, the shoulder bracket, even on its second revision, still had several partial failures during matches and will need to be rebuilt in metal to be strong enough.
- Stabilized camera: The new gimbal stabilized turret actually worked really well. We were able to reliably hit moving targets from the full length of the arena while in motion. It still has room for improvement, but overall was very reliable.
- 5GHz Video transport: We updated our video to use a custom protocol over multicast 5GHz wifi, so that we could completely control the amount of link layer retransmissions. When it worked, this worked very well. We were able to get 720p video with 200ms latency, even in the presence of significant interference. However, adding the external 5GHz wifi card to our odroid seems to have made the USB bus overall somewhat unstable, and one of our matches ended prematurely when the entire USB port died, taking our camera and wifi with it.
Matches
Thanks to Kevin from R-TEAM, we managed to capture overhead video of all our matches, and have the video as seen on our operator console for each official match as well.
A Modicum of Fun 