The Robot Club

2015 as seen my 2^nd year of contribution to the Rbot Club of the INSA de Toulouse. This is a student association composed each year of about fifteen people dispatched in three different domains:

• mechanics, the part where the moving parts and structures are chosen, drawn et put together ;
• electronics, consisting of the drawing and creation of integrated electronic boards, soldering and programming of microcontrolers driving motors and sensors ;
• and to finish with, the computer part, which drives microcontrollers and animates the whole robot using the successive mechanics and electornics abstraction layers.

Of course, I'm part of the computer team, as it is my current training, but also and mainly because of my centers of interest.

Every year, the club leads his robot or robots in the robotic tournament framed by Planète Science. Since several years now, the club reaches among the 20 first teams over a total of about 180 participating.

The code

The project's code, housed in a SVN repository, stand for the computer part a few more than 50,000 C++ lines, 4,000 in Python and 10,000 in C#. This part is split in 2 main parts :

• the code embedded into the robot ;
• a 3D simulator allowing to exécute le code above without a physical access to the robots.

Big news for this year 2015, the program embedded on the robot uses Petri nets. I created a whole implementation which allowed among other things to manage both elevators integrated on one of our robots, in a graphical and thread-safe fashion. This elevators are indeed meant to work in cooperatiion, software synchronisation being necessary for a correct and harmless behavior.

Second important evolution of the year, the use of a lidar sensor. This electronic device is used to map its close environment automatically and will be really useful for our robots to efficiently avoid their opponents and manage pathfinding. The INSA de Toulouse's Département du Génie Électrique et Informatique managed to buy such a sensor this year (The selling price being around 2,000 €). Two classmates and myself are willing to direct a school project towards the integrate this sensor with the robots during tournaments. Tou can find the details of this integration on this page.