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.

Who are we?

We are a family team based in Berkhamsted, a small, Hertfordshire town in the UK. The team members are:

Colin Grant 

I'm the main builder of the robot and developer of the core code. 

Svetlana Grant: 

Svetlana is currently doing a part time degree in Machine Learning at UCL, and will be looking to develop the speech recognition software - a new option for Pi Wars next year. 

 Anton Grant (age 10):

Anton is the main driver of the robot, utilised skills honed from hours of practice with a games controller. 

Max Grant (age 7):

Max is the chief robot tester. A youtube connoisseur, he'll also be the front man for any media presentations we need to make.  

Why enter Pi Wars? 

This is our second time entering Pi Wars. We entered our first robot, Sputnik, as part of the 2019 competition. We wrote a blog for that too, which can be found here. 

We hadn't developed a robot before, and it was great fun. We learned a great deal from the experience. Although Sputnik was only listed as a reserve in 2019, we got a late call up to enter the competition proper, and to our surprise managed to finish 3rd overall in the beginner's category. 

So we thought we'd give it another go for 2021 - this time in the intermediate category. 

Nanny McPi?  

Why the name "Nanny McPi"? Well this year's competition is going to be broadcast from the competitor's houses, with the theme based around household tasks, such as feeding the fish and tidying up the toys. Who better to help with that than a Nanny. This made us think of the film character "Nanny McPhee". A quick, subtle change to the name and we came up with "Nanny McPi" and it stuck.  

So that's a brief introduction to us and our robot.