Welcome to our blog!

My first post of our blog!

So, for your information...

We are a team of young programmers preparing for the upcoming 2015 iARoC competition. For those of you who don't know about this exciting coding/robotics event,  the iARoC, or International Autonomous Robot Competition, is an event in which many young (and not-so-young) programmers work in small teams (usually three to five people) to code a robot that'll complete specific tasks. The winning team gets some MONEY (but, alas, no chocolate) and glory. The robots most teams use are hacked Roombas (such as us), but I've seen Legos and even hand built robots. What we do is set up our robot at the beginning of a task, inject insert a program to the robot, and let it run by itself. There are 3 tasks at this competition: recover data, a race in which we see which robot go the quickest while staying within the boundaries, survey route, which is basically a maze, and claim mineral resources, which is a mad dash of all the robots to get to the infrared beacons first. I don't pretend to remember these names (we call them by.... simpler names), as I have the website in another tab. Get more info here: http://iaroc.org/!

This is our 3rd time competing (2nd for Anthony). On each of these 3 times, we used a Roomba, and we used Java to code and control the robot. Our first year was me (Ruoya), Russ, and Greg (another programmer, but he left us later). On our second year, we got Anthony, and we got 3rd place in the drag race (aka recover data). In the drag race, we had used the ultrasonic sensor to turn the robot when it strayed from the center of the lane. Also, we had used a strategy for the maze which we had dubbed the cookie crumb strategy, but unfortunately the ultrasonic sensors had collided with the wall, which pretty much plunged our robot to our doom. Let's hope this year will turn out better!