As some of you know (I'd like to think you notice xD), I haven't been able to join everyone for the Saturday gaming sessions yet. I've been very busy with robotics competitions, an hobby/extracurricular that takes up quite a bit of my time. In fact, I used to spend 15-20 hours a week on it minimum. I'm not so zealous about it anymore, though I do have the occasional 7 hour build session with my friend. Good times
Bear with me, it's kind of hard to explain it all at first.
Anyways, I compete in an international competition called VEX Robotics. (If you've heard of FIRST, it used to be part of that.) It's an ever growing competition for middle schoolers, high schoolers and college students, with thousands of teams competing yearly.
Each team must design, build, and program a robot to carry out specific tasks involved in playing a game. These tasks generally include picking up game objects/elements (ie. a ball, cube, ring, etc.) and scoring them on/in goals of varying types and sizes to recieve points. The game varies each year, and often has some sort of unique "catch" to it. A match consists of 4 teams on 2 alliances, and alliances change throughout a competition/tournament... I guess I'll explain that in a bit...
This year's game is called Gateway. It involves depositing balls and barrels into goals of varying heights. Umm... I'm not exactly sure what else say about it, so I'll link a few videos so that you might be able to see how it works:
Rules: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taf44kEt ... r_embedded
Gameplay: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxsWZXmF6Rs
(Since I have no footage of my own team, which consists of just me and my friend (and a few others, but they don't do much), I found a match of another team at my school, 3057. Their robot is the one starting closest to us.)
Winning local competitions and state championships qualifies you to attend the World Championships, which I've been to every year so far; we've been to Dallas twice for it and to Orlando once. I met Grant Imahara my sophomore year and got a few t-shirts autographed.
I'll most likely qualify this year, as well. Aaaaaaand, now the fun stuff, a few pictures of my robot xD
A deceptively simple design, it works pretty efficiently. I won't get into too much technical stuff, because I'd rather not make this post too long by going on forever about it xD
