TransformersRobotics

Last Practice Before State Tournament!

We reviewed our FLL Core Values, did a run through of our Technical Design presentation and practiced our Research Project improving our set-up time.  We then cranked up the Daft Punk tunes and ran the robot many times.  Check back in a few days for the video!

 

We got a full score for us -- 204 points!  We came near to it several times.

We stopped 15 minutes early and played Mind Craft to settle our nerves.  See you at GaTech in the morning!  Good luck to all teams.

 

 

Research Project Presentation

We have put the e-version of our research project presentation on YouTube - click here - and embedded it below.  Since making this slide show, which we shared with our experts, we have built a working model that uses white Legos as "soap" and blue Legos as "water".  We have not hacked a Kinect yet, but have someone helping us with that.

 

 

SPSU Super Regional Robot Highlight Video

We put togehter a qucik video of the highlights from robot rounds 1 and 2!  Watch it below or use this link - click here.

 

 

Super Regional Fun

The super regional qualifier tournament at Southern Polytechnic State University was a lot of fun and we did very well.  We won the first place Champions Award!  The day was full of fun and hard work by all of the teams and staff that hosted the event.

 

The guys with awards from SPSU, Walton and the Robot

 

Referee gives some last minute instruction

 

Mission 4 leaves the base to deliver the groceries to the table

 

Mission 2 changeover

 

The team awaits the start of Round 3

 

 

 

Super Regional, Here We Come!

With one more practice left, we are 99.9% ready for the Super Regional Qualifier Tournament this Saturday, 1/14, at Southern Polytechnic State University.  The public can watch from about 12:30 PM to the closing ceremonies around 4:00 PM.

 

We have further ingrained the FIRST Lego League Core Values over the last month.

We have improved our game strategy and are trying for 195 points!

We have fine tuned our research project presentation and added an actual demo of our idea.  We programmed our spare robot to actually dispense soap and water when one places one's hands near the dispenser and faucet.  We built some funnels and dump white Legos for the soap and blue Legos for the water.  It even has the logic built into it so the soap has to be dispensed first.

The team has improved the Technical Design presentation also.  We think we can tell the judges more in less time, so we have time to run the robot for all of our six missions.

 

See you Saturday.  Go, Go, Go Transformers, Go!

 

Walton Regional Qualifier Results

We had a great day at the Walton Regional Qualifier!  We had fun and did well, receiving an award for our research project -- the 1st Place Innovative Solution, which recognizes a team's solution that is exceptionally well-considered and creative, with good potential to solve the researched problem! We are going on to the next level -- SPSU Super Regional on Jan. 14th.

 

Research Project

There is a theme each FLL season.  This year it is Food Safety.  Our assignment was to research the topic, trace a food item from harvest to the table – farm to fork.  During its journey discover what could contaminate it, and then choose a problem to solve.  We need to share our research with others.  Finally, we get to present our research to a panel of judges at the tournament on December 10^th.  Below is a condensed version for our website.

 

Project Description

For our food journey, we traced shrimp from birth to the restaurant table.  We met a Moe’s owner who told us about their food safety program, then toured the restaurant.  We rated our own kitchens with the food safety inspection form.  We analyzed the inspection reports for all of the restaurants in the Woodstock area.  Hand-washing related violations were a major issue.  This was the focus of our research.

Here is the problem.  Food safety is in danger when employees don’t wash their hands.  Our research shows:

• 76,000,000 food-borne incidents account for about 5,000 deaths and 325,000 hospital visits each year.  It cost the US about $35 billion annually.
• Hand washing is the most effective way to prevent the spread of illness.  About 67% of those deaths could be prevented, if everyone just washed their hands!
• 96% of people say they wash their hands, but only 85% actually do.  A study at Turner field showed that only 77% of men washed their hands after using the rest room!  98% of women did.

 

We researched a couple alternate solutions that we did not use.

• Making an iPhone app that would tell people to wash their hands when the GPS located them at a restaurant, but it was too user dependent and complicated.
• We also looked at a plastic material that has a sharkskin pattern called Sharklet, which is highly resistant to bacteria growth.  We thought about making cutting boards with it, but it is not cut resistant.

 

Our innovative solution, the “Germinator”, is a system that ensures employees wash their hands and documents this for management.  Here’s how it works.

 

1. When the employee enters the store, his RFID name tag flashes red.  This alerts him, the manager and customers that he needs to wash his hands.
2. When he dispenses soap AND runs water for 20 seconds AND the Microsoft Kinect sees his hands in motion under the water, the name tag will turn solid green, so everyone will see that he really washed his hands properly.
3. Each event is logged in a database.

(click to enlarge)

We did a hand washing experiment to verify that 20 seconds, the time it takes to sing Happy Birthday twice, is a good amount of time to wash your hands.

We did not find any similar patents to our system.  There is an automatic hand washer on the market, but it is huge, expensive and a little scary!  Our system could be installed in just about any two restrooms for about $3,200.  This is a very good investment considering one food contamination incident can cost the store money, and more importantly, their reputation.  It could also cost someone their health or even their life!

Attachment Evolution

Each team member has a mission or multiple missions for which they have built attachments and programmed the robot.  All of our missions are working pretty well and we are ready to put them together into one system.  Recall that each team member built a robot, then we took the best features from each to construct one, best robot.  Then we cloned it, so that we had two to work with and a back-up.

 

Our team used a process of continuous improvement when designing and implementing our robot game strategy: Plan, Do, Check, Act or PDCA.

• We PLAN a mission, design and build robotic attachments and program the robot.
• We DO the mission.
• We CHECK to see if everything worked to successfully complete the mission.  If it did not…
• We ACT by improving the robot, the attachment or program until we are successful.

 

Below is a sequence of an attachment designed to deliver some food to a table for one of our missions.

 

 

Germ Anti-spill Device

At the tournament a team gets 12 points for each germ dispenser that is emptied provided that NO germs are on the playing surface outside of base at the end of the match.  There are four dispencers on the playing field.

 

We kept hitting them with an arm or part of clothing spilling them and making a big mess.  So, the kids devised a way to keep the bacteria and viruses from spilling accidentally during practice (see below).  At the competition, we'll have to be careful not to hit them and let the robot do all of the work.

 

Welcome to Moe's!

Project Research

 

The team went to Moe's for some project research and then dinner.  One of the owner's talked to us about what Moe's does to ensure food safety and then the store manager gave us a behind the scenes tour!  They do an outstanding job with food safety.