atari vintage team
robot arena contest
Studiolab joins the techniekworkshop ( the site is in dutch: It's a robot wars like contest without too much violence. ).In the week prior to the contest weekend we will use all the known techniques to design THE most user centered robot in history. Monday the assigment will be announced.
Our team was formed at the Robodock festival in september.
Our name needs some explanation:
The name Atari (当たり) comes from the ancient board game Go, where "atari" is a Japanese term that applies to moves which threaten to capture opponent's stones. It may be used during polite games as a courtesy to make one's opponent aware of the potential threat
And of course its a famous game company.
see wikipedia here and here.
Vintage : The produce of the vine for one season, in grapes or in wine; as, the vintage is abundant; the vintage of 1840.
Each member of our team has studied or is still studying industrial design engineering for at least 7 years
CULTURAL PROBOTS
Today October 13 we've released the first set of robot probes or proBots.
In the proBot package are elements to create a personal robot. The idea is that you create a robot and use a few days to express its personality and relationship with the robot.
The probes are released
Thomas van Rompay : Thomas has a background in psychology and dream analysis. He is about to finish his PhD on embodiment. He will outline the look and aesthetic expression.
Rolf den Otter : Rolf worked for many years at Philips on product sound. He will focus on the robots acoustic design.
Pieter Jan Stappers : Pieter Jan is the design techniques expert and a skilled gamer. He will focus on the strategy of the bot.
Marieke Sonnneveld : Marieke is a designer and about to finish her PhD on tactile experience. The feel of robots is oftentimes neglected; Marieke will focus on the tactile experience.
Marijke Melles : Marijke is also about to finish her PhD. She's an expert on intensive care units. She will design the ultimate caring bot : the nursebot.
The result of the proBots is amazing! Rich and wonderful stories with empathic robots; CC, nursebot Susie, Solaxa and Dinosaurusje. We were inspired by the returns of proBot package. We collected material to create a robot, but participants actually used the packaging for creating the robot. The package was actually used for constructing the robot, but this led to the insight that we could use the package of our robottoolkit too!
EXTREME ROBOTS and ROBOT RELABELING
During the Tuesday lunchbreak we approached the assignment with a robot relabeling session. We won't go into details here this week. Our stats have shown that these pages are intensively viewed by our opponents..
PLAY ROBOTTING and STORY BOTS
At the Wednesday lunchbreak the second robot shop will be held. We will act out the various scenarios and techniques developed on Tuesday. The most promising strategies will be written out in story bots. Studiolab invites bring pencils and paper.
MORPHO BOTS and ROBOT LIGHTING
On the last day before the contest we will choose the optimal technique using the well known morphologic robot chart. This design will be built using lego mindstorms and paper.
Parellel to this our design will be finalized and robotyped usign robot lighting
THE CONTEST
Building the robot this weekend is great. Not much sleep, good teamwork, working hard, very good food (not) and ingenious system for the robot. It collects pingpong balls by a scoop, and then transports these balls, in lovely pairs, slowly to the top.
Building complete
We somewhat finished building the robot after going strong for the last two hours. Completion required huge amounts of tape, but we're feeling confident. Even during the presentation for the jury, we we're doing the last bits of tinkering.
atariVintage triumphant, .... or not
Aernout was chosen as driver, because he tends to spend his time he could spend in a more useful manner for playing videogames. Last check before stepping unto the arena revealed a couple of new problems unfortunantely, but the show had to go on. We lost , but thankfully there was Ronald with a bottle of champagne to celebrate our victory. Thanks Ronald. Later on, the other team including employees (from Design Engineering) won; we really wanted to beat them. In our humble opinion we did win the best team-name-award.
And the winner is...
An illustrious team, called The Dodg, won. They seemed to have come from out of nowhere, crushing any obstacle they came across. Anyway, we had a blast and everything was definately worth it. Except for winning, we'd have done everything the same way all over again.
