This is my first post to this blog. I'd thought I'd explain what my intentions are and what the content will contain.

Background: I have been playing with autonomous robotics since my sophomore year at college. The Southeast IEEE student chapter hosts an annual Hardware competition. It involves a team of student constructing an autonomous vehicle to navigate a "game" board to complete assigned tasks and compete head to head against other student teams in the same region. While a EE has the electronics understanding, practical knowledge (and I only speak for my school) was nil. Worse, mechanical and machining knowledge were not included in the EE curriculum (although helpful subjects like art appreciation and philosophy were :rolleyes:) So a lot of it is OJT (on the job training). I have attended 4 of the competitions and helped with a fifth. This year I am advising my alma mater's team while building my own bot to compete with the same rules but not to be entered. It's good to have a set of goals when you start something like this so you know where you're going and how far you've gotten.

Intent: My purpose for this blog is to keep anyone interested up to date on my progress as I construct and code this bot. Hopefully you can learn from my experiences and I can be “kept honest” by feeling the need to make frequent updates and progress.

Content: I will try to make this a media rich blog with progress pictures, maybe video, charts/graphs and links to interesting sites I’ve uncovered.

Rules: The rules to the competition are http://www.southeastcon.org/2007/doc/SoutheastCon_2007_Hardware_Rules.pdf Broken down the robot will need to navigate to a code box, received/decode the IR transmission, then navigate to the ball box and present the code to get 3 more shots. To me the most fun part of this is the shooting of the balls through the hoop. This is what I’ve been working on the past week or so.

Onward.

Jay