You already know that I love robotics and working with primary and secondary school students to mentor them through the learning experience of building and programming robots for the Robocup Junior Australia challenges.
I was the Western Australia Rescue Line Coordinator for many years before moving to the Rescue Maze challenge in 2023. I have built many Rescue Line robots over the years, primarily using the various Lego Mindstorms platforms, including NXT, EV3 and now Spike Prime.
This article has a video demonstration of a Rescue Line robot created with a single Spike Prime kit (with the exception of an extra colour sensor and a Rotacaster omni wheel). The robot was created to work for both Primary Rescue Line and Secondary Rescue Line.
Primary Rescue Line
In the Primary Rescue Line configuration, the Robot is using 2 ports for the motors, 2 ports for colour sensors for the line following, including shortcut and spill area detection, a port for the ultrasonic sensor for victim detection and finally a port for the touch sensor to detect obstacles such as a water tower.
Hints: You can use the More Sensor Blocks extension to be able to read raw RGB values. This will allow for easy detection of silver (as opposed to white) using the red value. You can also convert RGB to HSI values for more accurate detection of colours regardless of lighting conditions or shades. See the articles in the more information section below.
Note: Take note of the cable management used in the robot, it is important to ensure that the excess cables cannot get caught on anything.
Secondary Rescue Line
For the Secondary Rescue Line challenge, we need to have a claw mechanism to capture and control the victim during the rescue. To achieve this an extra motor with a swing over arm has been added. As there are only 6 ports on the Spike Prime hub (a limitation after the eight ports on an EV3), we have to sacrifice the touch sensor so we can use the last port for the additional motor.
See the disconnected cable in the picture above with the motor now plugged in where the touch sensor was previously plugged in.
With the touch sensor no longer available to be used for obstacle detection, the ultrasonic sensor is now being used to detect if an object is directly in front of the robot.
Demonstration Video
Here is a video showing an earlier version of the secondary robot in action on a 300mm Tile course with a raised rescue/spill zone.
Robocup Junior Australia: Secondary Line Rescue Demo (direct link)
More Information
For more information, please see the following articles and websites:
- David’s Robotics Portal
- #MVPBuzz Why I Mentor Robotics
- #Robotics Lego Spike Prime Robots for Rescue Line and Rescue Maze
- New Robocup Junior Rescue Robot Videos and Spike Prime Review
- #Robotics Better Colour Detection by Converting RGB to HSI Values
- Robocup Junior Australia – Rescue Line (including Rules)
- Robocup Junior Australia – Rescue Line Resources
Enjoy
David
This article was originally posted on http://www.winthropdc.com/blog.