Ryan ChartrandCal Poly’s Institute of Electrical Electronic Engineers (IEEE) Computer Society will host the 14th annual Roborodentia contest Saturday, a hectic competition in which autonomous robots face off in a quasi-table tennis match.
“This is one of the biggest events that the College of Engineering puts on during Open House,” said John Seng, a computer engineering professor and faculty adviser to the IEEE Computer Society. “Over the last few years, we’ve had at least 1,000 people turn out, and it’s a good time at Open House for the engineering students to get excited and parents to come out and cheer for their kids’ robots.”
The event takes place with a court on nets on either side, slightly resembling a soccer field, with a wall in the middle dividing it in half. The object of the competition is to have your robot score as many ping-pong balls as possible into the opposing robot’s net. All robots are fully autonomous, requiring no in-game guidance from the team, which usually consists of two to three people.
“It’s fun to watch, seeing these autonomous robots do their own thing,” said Mike Staniszewski, computer engineering junior and president of the IEEE Computer Society. “A lot of the time the robots don’t know what the team wants them to do and crash into stuff.”
The competition not only provides an atypical form of entertainment for current and prospective students – a hybrid between table tennis and “BattleBots” without the explosions – but also gives students the opportunity to apply what they’ve learned about the basics of programming, circuitry and visual design in a team atmosphere.
“A lot of what’s applied is what you learn in class, but some of it is also what you learn on your own,” Seng said. “It’s good because these are real-life challenges that students gain experience from.”
“It’s really a good experience in working with robots, and it can be an interdisciplinary effort between majors on a team with one mechanical engineering guy, one guy on software, and another working on hardware,” Staniszewski said.
Both students and alumni enter the competition, creating a sort of new school vs. old school rivalry that only contributes to the good-natured competitive atmosphere of the contest. Many students also build robots as their senior projects, entering them as a
display of what they’ve gained from their years at Poly.
Robots typically cost between $100 and $400 to build, and the contest awards prizes of $1,000, $600 and $400 for first, second, and third places, respectively. The event is sponsored by Teradyne, an automatic test equipment manufacturer and designer.
With such attractive prizes at stake, teams frequently take it upon themselves to develop a unique strategy to pursue, and many make use of tactics that one would expect to find more often in sports than a robotics competition.
“We have some teams whose robots spend most of their time blocking the net as a sort of defense, then go over to the hoppers where the balls are collected and give the opposing side everything they’ve got in the final seconds,” Staniszewski said. “There’s a lot of
different things you can do and strategies that you can employ.”
“We also have some robots that are more offensively minded, whose robots utilize a baseball pitching machine-style of mechanism to shoot balls at the opposing goal,” Seng added.
The contest is viewed largely by current and prospective engineering students and their families, although it’s open to all majors. There are usually between 12 and 14 teams that compete each year.
The Roborodentia competition will take place at 1 p.m. Saturday in the Recreation Center.