ROBOTS will be racing against each other during the Northern Luzon Cluster Science and Technology (NLC-S&T) Fair on February 15 to 19, 2010 at the Benguet State University (BSU), La Trinidad, Benguet with the theme "Responding to Global Challenges through Science and Technology."
The Robotics Competition is one of the events for this year's NLC S&T fair organized and facilitated by the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) Cordillera in partnership with BSU.
It aims to promote engineering ingenuity among students and encourage them to build environmental-friendly and functional robots.
It will be held on the first two days of the week-long fair.
Students from the various universities and colleges all over Northern Luzon will be competing in two categories: Open Category with three sub-categories (Logic Gates, Microcontrollers, and Programmable Logic Controller); and Line Following Category with two sub-categories (Logic Gates and Microcontrollers).
The Open Category will feature functional and environment-friendly robots assembled and constructed by a team of students.
Robots must be pre-assembled and software program must have been pre-made before the start of the event.
During judging, teams will assemble the robots finally.
The competing robots will be tested and will demonstrate its uniqueness and capabilities to the jury.
Entries must not have joined previous competitions.
Teams must submit write-ups (abstracts of entries) to the MIS committee in electronic form through a temporary yahoo group, which shall be created on or before February 5, 2010.
For the Line Following Category, mobile robots or mobots will race against each other in pairs through two identical line tracks setup for the event in successive elimination rounds.
There will be no limits to the physical dimension of the mobots as long as it can negotiate and will not damage the tracks.
Hardware will be open-branded and open specifications, especially for microcontrollers, gates, sensors, chassis, etc. Circuitry, on the other hand, should strictly be started from scratch, while chassis maybe started from scratch or maybe modified from an existing one.
The mobots must be autonomous in operation with starting and stopping as the only allowed interaction with any outside intelligence.
This means that mobots must in no way be remotely controlled or programmed with course information in the middle of the race.
Battery replacements will be allowed after each race of every match.
The mobot that wins the most number of races will be declared the winner.
Contestants for the mobots may view the general track configuration in the internet at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6nURrmo35s.
Robots will be disqualified if the judges deem it to be dangerous to contestants, spectators, other robots, or the place of event.
Cash prizes along with certificates will be given to the winners.
Presently, there are 45 initial entries received from Saint Louis University, University of Baguio, and University of Cordilleras while the Collegio de Dagupan signified their participation. (John Santiago)