Dry Ice Robotics Visits Berkeley Robotics Lab
Berkeley is a university known for it’s science and engineering majors. Its robotics lab is one of the best in the nation. Visiting it was a great chance to learn about the top technology in our modern time. The FTC team 9784 got a chance to visit it on April 9th 2016. We saw not only robots perform amazing things, but also how the PHD students taught the robot to adapt to its tasks
The students showed us the robot they’ve been working on. As you can see in the image, the robot had two arms and also a head that contains a camera. The student taught the robot how to tie a knot by holding its arm and guiding it through each step. Through this experience the computer recognizes each step of action transferring it to the arms so the robot could perform the action by itself. We also saw the robot trying to put the brick into the hole. It didn’t know anything before it tried the first attempt. But it knows if the attempt was closer or farther to the goal. So whenever it does something wrong, it knows. It can analyze the previous steps and see what it did wrong and how it could correct itself. Even though it took 30 minutes for the robot to complete its task, its still many times faster than how long it took us to learn when we were babies.
After they showed us their robot we also presented our FTC robot from our last year’s competition. We tried to climb the stairs with our arms pushing downwards to the ground to lift up the front part of the robot. People circled around us to see how our robot “climb” up the staircases.