NXTasy.org Challenge No. 1 -
“Throw Me!”
Our first challenge, which ran from August 1st 2006 to December 1st 2006, aimed at building robots capable of throwing the blue plastic ball from NXT kit as far as possible.
The exact rules were published the NXTasy forums topic available here. A related Q&A topic which further explains and details these rules is here.
Winners and Prizes:
First Place - with a unbelievable result of 11 meters (about 430 inches!) is Combat_Israel. He wins a digital compass sensor from HiTechnic.
Best 5 throwers - Combat_Israel (430 inches), James German (204 inches), Rp181 (153 inches), msim (122 inches) and Todd Edmands (96 inches). All five will get a 25% discount coupon for an online purchase at mindsensors.com.
Here are some of the interesting contributions we received:
The Trebuchet
The very first contribution was from msim. Although he called it a catapult, this is in fact called a trebuchet. He put this online in NXTLOG here. The range was 122 inches. Notice the ingengious use of the NXT brick as a counter-weight (remember that our rules did not allow non-lego parts which are not absolutly necessary, but the use of the NXT as a (relatively) heavy weight is allowed). The video can be seen on YouTube here.
A real catapult was built by James German (Jaguar on our forums), but this robot was never submitted (reaches only 50 inches). Some texts and pictures of this robot are here. See also “Launcher 4.0″ below.
Dicke Bertha
The only MCP/MDP etc. contribution was from Matthias Paul Scholz. He built for the challenge “Dicke Bertha” and “Dicke Bertha II” (shown in image). Its firing mechanism is based on Brian Davis’ DAZLR design. In short, a series of worm gears moves a central part which pushes the ball, squeezing apart the holding arms until the ball manages to get out. Unfounatly it reaches only 37-40 inches. More details, images and videos are here (Bicke Bertha) and here (Bicke Bertha II).
GuardBot
Rp181 actually continued Matthias’s work, adding a fast rotating set of wheels in front of the ball’s path. This allowed GuardBot to reach as far as 153 inches, much more than Dicke Bertha! A Zip file with all the details and a movie is here.
Launcher 4.0
After making three other models which were never submitted, James German (Jaguar on our forums) submitted this model. This catapult uses a “locking” mechanism which holds it down, allow the other motor to release the string, and then releases the arm throwing the ball. He has a picture gallery here, and a video on his website. This robot’s range was 204 inches.
On his site (www.motocube.com), James has two more designs which were never submitted. you can see them here (”Spinner”, very similar design to the finalist robot by Combat_Israel!) and here (”Shooter”).
Hammer Time Catapult
Todd Edmands (tinkerer on our forums) submitted three models to our challenge. The last, and most successful one was this catapult (we refer to the robot, not Todd’s son standing behind it…). The range of this catapult was 96 inches.
And the winner… “Spinner”
The winning robot made by Combat_Israel, with a score of 433 inches. Here a heavy rotating arm is accelerated by two motors, and a third motor drops the ball. You can watch the video on YouTube here. Very impressive!
