Nanny McPi - Results and Videos

We had a great weekend watching many robots competing in the Pi Wars @Home 2021 live stream. 

Well done to Mike, Tim and Dave for managing to switch between live feeds, recorded videos and remote locations for live Pi Noon without too many hitches.  

And also well done for Brian at Micro Pi Noon HQ for keeping the robots going and connected and giving us a taste of live robot competition at last. 

So - when the results came in on Sunday afternoon - we sat with baited breath. We thought we had done well and were hoping for a top three position - but were blown away as the challenge results started coming through.

So here are Nanny's results and videos for the Sunday competition in the intermediate category: 

Feed The Fish - 2nd

• 1st M.E.T. Martian Emergency Team
• 2nd Nanny McPi
• 3rd Forest Fighters

Whilst we only managed to score 10 hits, doing this autonomously gave us more points and put us in second place. 

It doesn't seem fair in some way seeing the effort put in trying to get 15 golf balls to go into the bottom of the fish bowl by remote control, but having said that we did spend many hours and rebuilds trying to create our fish food cannon. Before the filming we would have been happy to have scored 6 or 7 shots so were delighted to score 10. 

Watching the M.E.T. team score a perfect 15 with their ingenious cannon and reload mechanism - 2nd place was by far the best we could hope for. 

Up The Garden Path - 3rd

• 1st - Red Brick
• 2nd - Forest Fighters 
• 3rd - Nanny McPi 

We were happy with our run but guessed it wouldn't be the quickest. The Forest Fighters run was shown on the day and was very fast. The RedBrick robot run wasn't shown, but I had followed his progress on twitter and knew it would be very quick - so wasn't surprised  to see him win this challenge. 

Tidy The Toys - 1st

• 1st Nanny McPi
• 2nd CNM HackerSpace
• 3rd RedBrick

We were delighted to come first. I'm guessing by the other results that we were one of the few (if not only) competitors to attempt this autonomously in the intermediate category. 

This challenge was really the main one that appealed to me when applying for Pi Wars 2021. So to win it was great. However, there were some great automated solutions in the Beginners and Young Persons categories that would have easily beaten us, so perhaps we were a little fortunate. 

Obstacle Course - 3rd 

• 1st Jkpg Makers 
• 2nd Dumont Cybernetics
• 3rd Nanny McPi 

This one was a surprise. The Jkpg maker team from Sweden managed to do their run fully automated, so this gave them a nice haul of extra points.  

However for most teams - especially family teams, I guess, where young drivers are itching to show off their skills - remote control was the way to go. 

Having watched the RedBrick obstacle course on the live stream, I'm surprised that wasn't in the top 3 though. Perhaps I'm being self critical but I thought it was funnier, more challenging and more dangerous than ours and deserved to finish higher.

Personally I think the obstacle course should be left as a remote control driving challenge going forward. You need at least one event where roboteers have a chance to show off their driving skills and won't automatically be beaten by some clever programming.  Hopefully at the in person events this will be the case. 

Artistic and Technical Merit - 4th (joint) / 8th (joint) 

How you're supposed to rank such different robots by artistic and technical merit I don't know - I'm glad we didn't have to judge this one. 

We were happy with these results - we spent a bit of effort fitting a lovely mane of hair on Nanny, and making her eyes move and light up so were happy these were appreciated in the artistic merit, although underneath it was just a few bits of wood screwed together. 

Another surprise to be quite high up in the Technical Merit table - getting the same result as the M.E.T. team with their walking robot. Perhaps the image detection software I described in the video was taken into account as we had taken quite a minimal approach to the hardware. 

Blogging - 1st 

I don't need to post a link to the blog - as you're in it! 

I really enjoy the blogging aspect of the competition and was delighted to come first overall. I started the blog back in November 2020 and tried to post fairly regularly as we made progress. I'm a little guilty of only posting successful outcomes though - if something doesn't work I don't blog about it until we've solved the problem. 

I think this is an often neglected challenge - in fact it's shown as 'optional' in the list of challenges - but it has the same points weighting as all the other challenges - so can really have a big effect on the overall positions. 

In fact this post was only supposed to be a quick link to the results and videos, but I seem to have got carried away. 

Overall Placings - Intermediate - 1st

So - with all these good results we were delighted to find out we had won the intermediate category outright. 

Lots of cheering and high fives ensued - not sure what the neighbours thought? It's also taken some of the pain away from another result that came in much later on the same day that we don't like to talk about. 

Perhaps the nature of this year's event was skewed towards competitors who were able to complete the challenges autonomously. Because we were able to repeatedly run the challenges until they worked, the automated teams would always beat those using remote control.  

In live events the autonomous option would be much higher risk as it may not work in different conditions on the day and you have limited runs, so the remote controlled teams would be better placed to compete.

A Brilliant Competition

We had a great time building and programming Nanny McPi and hope she provided some entertainment on the live stream. We would once again like to thank all the organisers, judges sponsors and anyone who helped to make Pi Wars 2021 a reality. 

Hopefully we can all meet up in person next year.