1 of 36

Virtual Robotics

Fun Hour

May 15th, 2020

2 of 36

Host - Ellen Sun

3 of 36

Virtual Robotics Fun Hour

Every Friday at 7pm CDT, starting on 4/17/2020
Hosted by Technicbots 8565 team members
Four modules

Online Resource
Builder Zone
CAD topics
RoboCode Virtual Battle (welcome submission of your robot code)

Mute yourself when not talking, ask questions in the zoom meeting chat window
Expect a reminder email (with Zoom meeting info) one day before event
Expect an email after event with the link to this slides
Any questions and suggestions of topics? please email: technicbots.team@gmail.com

4 of 36

folding@home

We are contributing to folding@home to find cure for covid-19. You are welcome to join our team (Flyset: 256564) to contribute your idle computing power at home.

https://foldingathome.org/category/covid-19/

5 of 36

3D PPE Print Fundraiser

Your donation is appreciated.

https://tinyurl.com/FLYSETPPEGoFundMe

6 of 36

Winners of 5/8/2020 Rubriks Cube Competition

Please email your home address to technicbots.team@gmail.com for receiving in mail.

(Alex Z, Hank, Ethan, Andrew, Luke, Louwyn, Bryan, Alex W, William)

7 of 36

Online Resource

Ellen Sun

8 of 36

Raspberry Pi

cheap, credit-card sized computer
can be programmed in Scratch or Python
available at https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/

9 of 36

Raspberry Pi

https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en

Free sign up with email

Wide variety of projects you can do with and without a raspberry pi
Each project has step-by-step instructions on how to complete it

10 of 36

Software Project Example

https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/projects/cd-beginner-scratch-sushi
No hardware required

11 of 36

Hardware Project Example

https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/projects/build-a-buggy
Raspberry Pi and certain parts needed

12 of 36

Builder Zone

Derek He

13 of 36

What is Swerve Drive

Special type of drivetrain
Each wheel powered and turned independently
Common in FRC

14 of 36

NASA’s Swerve Drive

15 of 36

Swerve Drive in FTC

16 of 36

Swerve Drive Pros

Maximum maneuverability at high speeds
Multidirectional movement smoothly

Sideways
Diagonal

Navigate game field better
Easier to line up for scoring

Keeping same orientation

Harder to defend against
Better pushing power vs other drivetrains (mecanum)

17 of 36

Swerve Drive Cons

Hard to build and code
Hard to fix if failure occurs
Heavy
Uses 4 motors and 4 servos or 8 motors
Potential issues when driving
Limits robot design

Wheels must be on the corners

18 of 36

CAD Topics - Simulation and Animation

Max Fan

19 of 36

REV Mini Bot

A kit that has instructions and materials on how to build in CAD and irl

20 of 36

Simulation in CAD

Why?

A quick way to show how a mechanism working before physically building it

What?

Mechanical mechanisms such as gear trains

How?

Using different joints you can manually control a CAD component object

Revolute makes the object rotate
Slider makes the object move back and forth linearly

21 of 36

Simulation Demo

22 of 36

Animation in CAD

Why?

Animation clips to demonstrate to others of the intended design functions

What?

Mechanical mechanisms of any 3D model (could be done without consideration of any mechanical constraints)
Navigation of any 3D model in a setting (e.g., FTC field)

How?

In Fusion 360, there is an animate workspace
You animate by moving the model to the location you want it to go to with specific time duration, and it saves the movement/location to playback

23 of 36

Animating Demo

24 of 36

RoboCode Virtual Battle

Byron Li / David Hu / Victor

25 of 36

Eclipse Check In & Developing Tips

We highly recommend you have Eclipse installed as it offers a much more streamlined coding experience. Instructions were sent out in the email and you can find them again here (same doc as install instructions last time)

https://robowiki.net/wiki/Robocode/Eclipse

Brief General Overview

Nice little intro to Java: https://www.slideshare.net/intelligotech/java-tutorial-ppt-7189933

Some quick general coding tips

Keep class name the same as your file name and make sure it is descriptive
Look through error messages to try and figure out problems in code. If you are stuck, try looking up the exact text of the error message online!
Make sure to have imported a library before you use it: more on that later

26 of 36

Robocode: Radar setup

We didn’t get time to go over this in depth, so we will be going over radar techniques again today
First things first, we need to change our Robot into an Advanced robot. Do that by changing the line that says extends Robot to extends AdvancedRobot
In run() you should then try to add

setAdjustGunForRobotTurn(true); and

setAdjustRadarForGunTurn(true);

This allows your robot's base, gun, and radar to rotate independently. It is essential for radar targeting.
One of the first actions your robot should then do is turn the radar as much as possible. A very simple way to do this is just to add

setTurnRadarRight(Double.POSITIVE_INFINITY); //this will spin the radar until it scans a robot

27 of 36

Robocode: Radar turning calculations

Now that our robot is constantly spinning, we want to turn whenever it scans a robot
We can do this by editing our onScannedRobotEvent() code.

double radarTurn = getHeadingRadians() + e.getBearingRadians() - getRadarHeadingRadians();

This part basically returns what angle the scanned robot is to us

This part is the original angle of the radar. To find out how much we still need to move we just subtract it

setTurnRadarRightRadians(Utils.normalRelativeAngle(radarTurn) * 2); //the *2 increases the reliability because sometimes the robot will fail to turn and lose the lock

28 of 36

Improving your radar

The lock-on radar we just made is pretty neat, but it's nowhere near scratching the surface of radars. For one, we are doing 4-robots battles in our tournaments. Locking on to just one robot means we don’t have any info on the others! For ideas to improve your robot, check out

https://robowiki.net/wiki/Radar

29 of 36

Robot Challenge #4

Create a new radar that constantly spins around. Every time you scan a robot, track its energy and name. Try to store the energy values of all the robots you scanned and track the differences between the old and new values. This is crucial to learning how to dodge bullets.

For help, look into this article

https://robowiki.net/wiki/Melee_Radar

30 of 36

Sharing Robot Insights

We are all in this to learn about coding together, and even though it’s fun to get competitive in our tournaments, keep in mind our overall goal is still to teach everyone as much as we can.
With that in mind, the winner of each division’s tournament is expected to share some thoughts about their code and the thought that went into their robot.
If you are confident in your robot, make sure to think about what you are going to say if you win!
Good luck everyone.

31 of 36

Virtual Robot Tournament #3

Division 1 (Qualification Round)

Bracket

https://tinyurl.com/robocodebattlebracket

Robot Name	Coder Name	Robot Score
CHRISTINAA	christina zhu
Acid	Andrew
MojoJojoTheDestroyer	Selena
Bobminion	Michelle Bao

32 of 36