One of the challenges with the Robocup Junior Australia Line Rescue challenge is handling when the tile colours are reversed, that is a white line on a black background. This tile is called “Night Drive”.

There is also a tile which has a wider black line but is still on a white background. This tile is called “Wide Road” but is probably only used for the Western Australian competition.

This article explains techniques that can be used to update the line following algorithm for a two-sensor line following robot to handle these two tiles.

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I have been involved with mentoring robotics to primary and secondary school students for many years. However, you might not know that back in 2023, I took over the role of Rescue Maze Challenge Coordinator for Robocup Junior Australia at the national level when my friend, Neil Gray, went to the US for a few years.

One of the primary projects I championed was the creation of a simpler Maze challenge than the original Open Maze challenge. We wanted something that beginners and younger students would enjoy getting involved with, which had a much gentler learning curve and lower cost barriers than the existing Open Maze challenge. This new division was named Mighty Maisy Maze (MMM) and was based on ideas that Neil had before he left.

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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.

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A couple of years ago I created some videos showing how to use the Lego Spike Prime set to build robots for the Robocup Junior Australia Rescue Line and Rescue Maze challenges.

This article is just to make them easier to find from David’s Robotics Portal.

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Today’s article is a welcome addition to David’s Robotics Portal. It is a “brain dump” of all the hints, tricks and techniques I can think of that will help you create a successful dancing robot for the Robocup Junior Australia Onstage Performance challenge.

If you are planning to compete in this challenge, the information in this article will help you get the best performance and the most points you can.

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At the recent Robocup Junior Western Australian State Championships competition, I took a few moments just before the awards ceremony to demonstrate a robot that could move in any direction.

While the actual robot was originally designed for the Rescue Maze challenge to allow it adjust its position in the maze by moving sideways, it ended up being much more capable in how it can move and could be the basis for a dancing robot for the Onstage Performance challenge. 😀

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Following on from the Robocup Junior Western Australian State Competition 2020 article I wanted to share with you some videos of the robots I have been working on.

As an adult I cannot compete in the Robocup Junior competition, but there is nothing stopping me enjoying working/playing with Lego Mindstorms robots and coding something that has a presence in the physical world. Continue reading →

As you may know I am on the Western Australian Committee for Robocup Junior Australia. This year the WA State Competition, along with most of the other state competitions and the national competition, were cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

As Western Australia was in a good position with no community transmission, it was decided to hold a delayed WA State Competition in November instead of the usual August.

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Just when I thought I had finished the series of articles explaining the techniques need to complete the Robocup Junior Australia Line Rescue Challenge, I realised that there were some additional considerations and advice that will help take your robots to the next level.

The idea of this article is not to provide solutions, but to make teams aware of issues and problems they make encounter, so they can make their hardware and software more robust and capable.

Good Luck.

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The previous article in this series covered how to find the victim in the rescue zone for the Robocup Junior Australia Line Rescue challenge:

• #Robotics Finding objects with an Ultrasonic sensor

This article covers the steps needed to complete the rescue depending on the division you are competing in; Primary, Secondary or Open.

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This is almost the final article explaining the techniques to handle the challenges your robot will face during the line rescue division of Robocup Junior Australia competition.

Your robot should now be able to navigate all the way through the course following the line and handling intersections and obstacles in its path. The final part of the challenge is the rescue and this article discusses the first part of the rescue process…. finding the victim.

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Keeping the momentum going, here is the next article in this series to help you prepare of the Robocup Junior Australia competition.

Your robot should now be able to line follow and navigate intersection markers successfully, so the next task is to make sure it can handle obstacles (previously known as the water tower) that might be placed in front of it. This challenge can be a little tricky as the robot will need to leave the line and then find the line again to continue line following.

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The Robocup Junior WA State Competition for 2019 is just around the corner, so I thought I would get back to writing some more of the blogs in this series.

So far we have concentrated on building and programming of a Line Following Robot, but we have not discussed the handling of intersections or shortcuts. These are the green squares which indicate the direction a robot should turn when it reaches an intersection.

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On the 15^th March 2018, the Robocup Junior WA Committee ran a Rescue Line Workshop at All Saints’ College.

The workshop was a great success with a large turnout who enjoyed the session and learnt the basics of building a robot (both hardware and software) for the Robocup Junior Australia Rescue Line challenge.

[Edit] While the video was recorded in 2018, all the materials in the shared folders linked to are being kept up to date.

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