Landroids Won Grand Prize Moonbots Challenge!

September 3rd, 2010

Landroids Won Grand Prize Moonbots Challenge!

After four months of Moonbots competition, on September 1, 2010, the X PRIZE Foundation and the LEGO Group announced team Landroids as the Moonbots grand prize winner, and will be invited to Denmark to visit the LEGO headquarter plus receiving $1,300 for the FTC registration kit!

See here for the 2010 Moonbots winner and award list. Congratulations and thank you to all 2010 Moonbots teams. You all have been our inspiration and motivation to keep moving forward!

The Moonbots challenge is a global web-base robotics competition, for students ages 9 to 18 under the supervision of an adult team captain. It was jointly sponsored by Google, X PRIZE, LEGO, National Instrument, and the Wire Magazine. The Moonbots competition simulates the real-life $30 million privately funded Google X PRIZE lunar challenge, except that these junior league teams can use LEGO and Mindstorm NXT to create their robots. (See MSNBC Science blog).

The competition was conducted in two phases. More than 210 teams from 16 countries competed in Phase 1, which was narrowed down to 20 top teams to advance to Phase 2 based on the robot design proposal CAD renderings and the research video. Each 20 teams was then given a LEGO Moonbots mission field to design a robot in 6 weeks, then conduct a live robot mission through Skype to Moonbots on a designated date and time. Each team also needed to create a blog site about their robot designs, and create a team documentary video.

It has been a grueling summer for the Landroids, but the hard work was well worth it! We had back-to-back competition deadlines for months. Try: end of last December for FLL, end of February for eCYBERMISSION research submission, end of May for Moonbots Phase 1 submission, end of June for eCYBERMISSION national competition at Baltimore, MD, then mid-August for the Moonbots Phase 2 deadline!

Most members also had six weeks of summer schools, plus summer camps and vacations. Never did we envision our team would have received the 1^st place national title in eCYBERMISSION at the same time as being the Phase 2 Moonbots finalists. Our team was excited but recognized that the effort could be limited due to summer schedules. So if we just try our best with Moonbots, even if our team does not win (what are the chances sizing up again FRC and FTC veterans?), it would have been a good learning experience to play with all sorts of non-FLL legal HiTechnic sensors and learn LEGO Digital Designer (LDD).

The “learning experience” soon became a series of obstacles to overcome. First, two of our Mindstorm NXT screen blackout so everyone had to cough up their NXT modules to use. Then came the late stage robot reconstruction, followed by losing all NXT-G programs a week prior to the deadline and had to learn LabView (tears). The documentation team just couldn’t figure out which movie/video software to learn in a short period of time. All we had was a little camera to take pictures and videos, there was no video making equipment to do much any special effects when creativity counts for a third of the scores, (not that Landroids is known for much artistic creativity and team spirit anyway). By the time of the robot live webcast judging, our team has dwindled down to 3 members. Then all six cameras setup for the live webcast were failing one by one.

Throughout facing various setbacks and difficult decisions, the “trying it for fun” mentality soon became a stubborn “we won’t give up”. Instead of two hours per weeknight open door policy for team time for whoever was around, everyone doubled that time at nights whenever possible (wouldn’t go home), and came back for more on the weekends. There were times when the coaches had to turn the team members away on the weekends because we were still sleeping!

So what did Landroids learn from the Moonbots challenge? First of all, lunar mission and space exploration are not easy but are very important for accelerating science and technology frontiers. Our team got to experiment with a bunch of HiTechnic sensors such as the gyro, EOPD, compass, IR link, and ultrasound, etc, which will be a tremendous help in FTC. We learn how to make videos with the simple Microsoft Movie Maker, and carefully produced quality work and blogs. The best part about Moonbots was that we got to see what all other top teams were doing through their blogs and websites. It was very inspirational! Much to learn from each other.

Now that we have immortalized our Moonbots robot, (which resembles a supermarket shopping cart), we will take a short break this weekend, while the coaches are recuperating from being evacuated 500-miles from the vacation home due to hurricane Earl. Then Landroids will be back preparing for the FTC kickoff!

More information can be found from the following articles: