Birthday surprise

It was 20 Nov (My birthday) and I was at the school where my wife works. Was planning to   spend a day with kids at school. After lunch i was chatting with director of the school, Mr Anand. Mr Anand  mentioned that the kids are going to participate in First Lego League competition   sponsored by Caterpillar. Since the Capterillar Coordinators were from non circuit background, they were actively looking for some one who has electronics back ground to mentor the kids and asked me if i would be interested. Note this, i will come to this later. I looked at my wife (who generally cries at me for my crazy electronics hobby)  and was giving a "So called Indian Nod" and the director was in confusion if it was a no or yes .To my surprise my wife smiled at me which was a firm "Yes". In order to mentor these kids I had to sacrifice (not really) my weekends for about three months.If not this one then I would have been  meddling with some crazy electronics stuff in weekends. In this task  my wife would accompany me happily, instead of crying at me for not spending weekend time with her.

Then came the first weekend, We drove to the home where these kids were sitting with pile of Lego blocks and making some models.

I was sitting with Rajkumar the caterpillar guy, we were trying to read some 100 page document to understand the rules.

Who reads manuals now a days, so we looked at this video to understand the rules. http://youtu.be/Hb5xj0FUSPY

If you have patience go through this video. On a higher level the theme for this year challenge is Nature's fury and the robot we design should help the flora and fauna in the so- called play-field mat.

What you see in the mat are pre-built properties. Our task is to just design robot which will solve the following tasks built using these properties.

Some tasks are

1. Collect all the pets and kids which are scattered and in solitary and keep them with community of people.
2. Remove branch of tree carefully that is about to fall on high voltage line 
3. Take the milk truck and emergency supplies truck to correct places
4. Safely land the flight that is in final stages of landing
5. Simulate tsunami and earthquake
6. Relocate a movable building to non earthquake prone zone.
7. Finally cross multiple obstacles and reach destination.

Robot can be launched only from base and robot should return to base once it completes tasks. User is not supposed to touch it outside base.

We found that single design cannot achieve all these tasks and we divided all these tasks into five missions. Where we will have common base robot and have five different attachments or Addon for each mission. For example, robot will complete mission one and come to base and we will remove the mission one add on and attach mission two add on and like this it will continue until mission five is complete. I will not go in to details of how each mission was achieved, if you want more details ,then post here, I am happy to reply.

Before going into challenges, I will explain a bit about the Lego mind-storm

1. Senses of this robot include ultrasonic, touch and color sensors.
2. Locomotion using servo motor.
3. All this is controlled by CPU called brick that is programmed using visual programming tool similar or lab-view or scratch.

Some big challenges we faced were

1. Tracking and locating the robot in the field. This was done using line tracking and wall following. I even used PID algorithm here.
2. Friction of mat so we have to do continuous correction to robot position using properties around.
3. Creating mechanical add-on. I am not very great  mechanical engineer, But my child hood experience with Lego blocks helped.

I feel if I explain the whole design it will be more monotonous, as said earlier interested pals ping me here.

This design went on weekends for the next two months. I taught the students the rules, usage of Lego mind-storm, programming software and finally some Physics / Maths concepts like friction, color sensing, circumference - radius, car steering concepts etc. That was a  steep learning  for everyone. The kids were good enough to catch concepts and came out with innovative ideas.

We designed first revision of our bot. But on trial we found we need two light sensors to correct our bot . But the shocker was, we had only one. We placed an overseas order and it would reach us very late. With no way to expedite we were worried.To our surprise we found a Lego enthusiast who had association with the school. He loaned us the light sensor. Note this place I will come to this later. With that sensor, our final design was done and our robot started completing missions.

Some videos of our robot in action.

Then came the second shocker.Our kids have to do a presentation on any natural calamity that they have experienced and preventive measures for the same. We completely overlooked this  as it was only in the last few pages of that 100 page document. My wife who is a civil engineer turned school teacher pitched in and took the responsibility of training the kids for presentation. Note this place I will come to this later. The kids selected storm rain and after effects. Every Bangalorean  would know this, remember "potholes"?

Everything was ready and we were at Caterpillar Chennai for the event. First half was presentation and robot design explanation, where the kids were asked if they are fine in speaking English. Perhaps the judges thought these kids cannot speak English well because they are from school for  privileged and  poor  which was ran by aid from Germany. But the kids surprised the judges with their accent, even I was surprised by the self-confidence of the kids. 

Next event was the robot playing actual mission in the play field. Our robot behaved bit like Indian young cricketing team touring overseas and surprised by bouncy tracks. The mat used in final was very old/rough. I had used too much of my engineering brain and had so many feedback mechanisms and  tuned it for nice smooth mat. There were chances we would have scored good if that extra implementation was not there. At that moment I thought even too much of knowledge is dangerous. I though we lost the battle.

Our dugout was silent as grave during the next few hours. Then, came the final results and our kids were sitting there with frown faces. There came the announcement for the  best robot designed and it was us, everyone was jumping to sky and we collected the trophy. Until that moment  we were not aware  that there was a category for Best robot design. We knew that there were awards only for the best presentation and high scoring team in field.

I believe you will remember  places I asked you to mark and here I come again 

1. The probability of me going to the school on my birthday was 1/100 and it was my better half who pushed lazy me.
2. The probability of guys who come and spend their birthdays with kids being a crazy stupid electronics engineer is 1/100.
3. Probability of kids getting second light sensor is 1/100.
4. Probability of these kids getting mentor  for presentation whom is a civil engineer turned school teacher is 1/100.
5. Probability of the too much engineered design getting prize for category for which we never designed robot is 1/100.

The total probability of these kids getting this experience and finally the award is 1/10^10. Think for a moment why this was possible. I am firm believer that "God will put right people at the right spot in the right time to help the right people". Many times I have regretted for things I missed in life, but later I have realized that miss was a right one and it indeed helped me in some other way. I want to finish this with Shakespearean quote "All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players". Agree with me? Was it to Philosophic?