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Having witnessed the 1997 EPFL fire fighting robots contest, we were
so impressed we immediately decided to build our own robot to participate
in the 1998 event.
At first only a team of two (Marco and Roman), Mauro joined
us at the beginning of 1998. Each one of us then took care of
distinct parts of the robot: Marco = sensors,
Mauro = power electronics and mechanics,
Roman = programming and odometry.
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A month before the contest, Prof. Nicoud, responsible for the
EPFL contest, informed us about a similar event in
Hartford, CT (USA),
which was to take place the day before the 1998 EPFL robot contest.
Thanks to our sponsors,
we were able to participate in this new challenge.
Our robot, or rather the working parts of it, was flexible enough
to face the new task: find and extinguish a single candle placed at
random in a maze. The detailed description of the maze was published
well before the contest.
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We then spent our nights and weekends at
LAMI (Microprocessors Systems Lab),
until our robot finally worked quite well. Five days before the Hartford
robot contest, we left Switzerland and flew to New York. The personnel of
the New York Institute of Technology on Broadway kindly let us work in their
electronics laboratory to check whether the robot had survived the journey.
When we arrived in Hartford, there were still lots of things to fix on our robot,
but finally it functioned satisfactorily. However, we could count on Murphy:
at the very moment of the contest, the robot simply refused to budge!
Luckily we found the burnt chip in time. Of 60 robots present, ours finished second,
bested only by the Trinity College (Hartford) students' robot.
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