The Mighty Morphin Tower Arrangers are:

Chris Barlow

Darren Lewis

& Ted the Robot

About Us

The Mighty Morphin Tower Arrangers are a team entering into the competition, Eurobot 2009: Temples of Atlantis (see www.eurobot.org for details).

Darren Lewis and Chris Barlow are both BSc Engineering Product Design students from Middlesex University in North London, UK.

Although the task for this year's competition is a complex one, the Tower Arrangers' philosophy is to use as few moving parts as possible, and to use natural forces wherever they are available. This should result in an economical, reliable system designed to score a realistic number of points match after match.

This site will follow the team's progress from initial design to final build and our progress through the competition itself.

The Contest

"Eurobot is an amateur robotics contest open to groups of young people from around the world, organised in teams."

"The aims of the contest are to favour the public interest in robotics and encourage hands-on practice of science by young people. Eurobot is intended to take place in a friendly and sporting spirit."

"More than a simple championship for young people or a competition, Eurobot is a friendly opportunity to unleash technical imagination and exchange ideas, know-how, hints and
engineering knowledge around a common challenge. Creativity and interdisciplinary is necessary. Eurobot values fair play, solidarity, creativity and sharing of technical knowledge,
whether it is across technical realisations or project management."

"Eurobot takes place in Europe, but is open to teams from other continents. Countries with more than three teams interested in participating must organise a national qualification in order to select the three teams which will participate to Eurobot finals."

[www.eurobot.org, 2008-2009]

Friday 24 April 2009

Obstacle Avoidance

The team are using 2 Sharp infra-red sensors to find the position of other robots on the table. Both sensors are placed just higher than the column element dispensers to try to avoid the robot reacting to anything other than another robot. Both sensors face forward.

The team calibrated the sensors and created a sub program on the main drive board to tell the motors to react. When the sensors see another robot which is positioned in the way, the motors will stop for 0.7seconds, then if the sensors still see the robot, the motors will reverse until the other robot is gone, then attempt to return to the point it left.