The Plan Part 3 - The Challenges

So - how will we attempt the challenges? For the arena challenges we feel it's such a controlled environment we should be able to attempt them all autonomously. The obstacle course will be done remotely as it'll be more fun to come up with obstacles. 

I decided not to compete in Pi Wars 2020 as I wanted to spend a little bit of time looking into computer vision. The plan was to use OpenCV - but then during the Pi Wars 2019 Mini Conference, I was inspired by Brian Starkey's talk on "Computer Vision from Scratch" to try and write my own. 

The Plan Part 2 - Building the Courses

One further challenge this year is to build the arena and courses yourself at home. 

The Arena

The Arena needs to be fairly big - 1.5m x 1.5m. We don't have anywhere to have this permanently, so will need to build something that is portable. 

The walls need to be at least 50mm high - but to give us a good background for the camera we'd be looking to make them much higher.

The Plan Part 1 - The Robot

This series of posts are about how we plan to tackle the robot build and implement the challenges. Whether the finished result will be anything like this, we'll have to wait and see. 

The Robot 

Nanny McPi will be a straightforward 4WD skid steer robot. It will be built out of 3mm plywood with hex spacers in between. When building Sputnik for the 2019 competition I received a Dremel Moto-saw for my Birthday. This is a portable scroll saw that meant I could cut the plywood fairly accurately without the need for a laser cutter. 

Introduction

What is this Blog?

This blog describes the progress of the Nanny McPi team, accepted as an entrant in the Pi Wars at Home 2021 competition. 

Pi Wars is a robot competition where competitors build A4(ish) sized robots with a Raspberry Pi as the central 'brain'. These robots must compete a series of non destructive challenges using either by remote control or autonomously.  

Part of the competition is to write a blog, so here is ours. We'll try to keep up to date showing progress to date, along with some technical descriptions of our robot.