Where Else Do You See Cheering Crowds in a Classroom
Andreas Birk · 2010
Robockey Cup is also an excellent example for yet another facet of robotics and automation education, namely its constant evolution along technological developments—especially with respect to the availability of sensors, actuators, and computation power that are sufficiently accessible and affordable to be suited for educational activities. The Robockey game reminds me a lot of course on autonomous systems that I taught for several years at Flemish Free University in Brussels since 1997. The course included a laboratory module, where the students had to build and program robots that could play “wallball,” i.e., push a ball against a wall while an opponent robot tried to prevent this. The robot, its opponent, as well as the ball, which was actually more like a puck as in Robockey, were all marked with colored lights that could be detected with simple light sensors in combination with color filters. The behaviors that could hence be programmed on the robots mainly had to be reactive; only very coarse odometry information for localization and a short-term tracking of the relative trajectory of the opponent could be used for implementing some strategy.