Get Your Bot On! 2012 Winning Robots: Lady Sterling, Emocat and Ike
Preparations for Get Your Bot On! 2014 are well underway but we haven’t even told you which teams won last year and what bots they made. We had over 60 participants for the 2012 hackathon. Artists, engineers, designers and programmers all came together for the weekend to build prototypes of their robot ideas. The weekend kicked off at the Idee offices where participants had a preview of the kit, shared their robot ideas and formed teams. They worked Saturday and part of Sunday on their bots with the help of our mentors and with help from each other. The collaboration was amazing.
Thanks to our sponsors there were delicious meals, snacks, and beer. Our numerous volunteers made sure everything went smoothly and everyone had what they needed.
The bots were judged based on three categories, Design, Innovation and Technology. Every team, regardless of previous experience and skill, created a moving bot. It was truly impressive!
The Design category was dominated by Lady Sterling, who may be the world’s first cocktail party robot created by Stefanie Hutka (@StefanieHutka) and Ross McKegney (@rossmckegney). Lady Sterling uses sensors and motors to listen and react to the environment around her. Stefanie a neuroscientist, explained the team was trying to explore the processes by which we filter multiple audio sources in an environment such as a cocktail party in order to focus on specific interactions. During the building phase, Lady Sterling was already the life of the party with Stefanie providing live music to help with debugging.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zv0QB3i6tM8 Lady Sterling, Design Category Winner at Get Your Bot On! 2012, Stefanie Hutka and Ross McKegney
In this next video, Ross and Stephanie talk about the process of building Lady Sterling, the sensors they used, and how easy they found working with the Arduino Microcontroller provided as a part of our kit.
http://youtu.be/unuY3KWhc2M
Top honours in the Innovation category went to Ike, the tumbleweed robot designed and built by Rob King (@additv), Stefan Powell (@spDuchamp), Varun Vachhar (@winkerVSbecks), and Adam White (@adamkeithwhite ). The team wanted to explore the rolling motion of tumbleweed and try to replicate it robotically. The team prototyped various configurations of the cage and weighted drive system throughout the weekend. Watch the video below for their results:
http://youtu.be/hQDUXu6g0TM
The top spot in the Technology category was the Emocat, a furry blue cranky robotic pet created by Michael-Anthony Tedesco, Peter Martin, and Victor Ragusila. The Emocat is a soft blue pet-able cat (that sort of looks more like a squirrel) that will respond to your affectionate touch as temperamentally as any real cat will. Emocat’s fuzzy exterior conceals its complicated circuitry:
Emocat can be quite a friendly companion, just so long as you don’t press too hard…
http://youtu.be/hsnbNqE8NSI
Honourable mentions for the runner up in the Design category were given to Pearl Chen (@PearlChen), Patrick Dinnen (@pdinnen), and Renat G. for their moustache drawing creation, Mr. Moboto.
Initially, Mr. Moboto seemed to only want to draw very nice semicircles, as seen above. It wasn’t until the final demos, however, that Mr. Moboto showed his sketching ability and his support for the Movember fundraising campaign.
http://youtu.be/oQPFX1DVc2c
These were only some of the many great creations that came out of last year’s Get Your Bot On! Hackathon, and we’ll take time in the next few weeks to highlight a few more as we build towards this year’s event. We are so excited and we can’t wait to see what great new bots will be created this year!
