FIRA 2018 Taiwan - Hurocup Kid Size

In 2018, I applied for an undergraduate research award. I had to write some essays about what I want to do in the future, what I am doing to accomplish it and how the labs at the university would be able to help. That's when I came across the Autonomous Agents Lab (AaLab), Dr. John Anderson (Lab Director) and Dr. Meng Cheng "Mc" Lau (Post Doc Fellow). They showed me around the lab, the research they do and the competitions they have participated in. I got very excited to see the combination of hardware and software without knowing much about the hardware. I wrote my essays and got the award.

If I could describe my first month in this lab with two words, it was: Total Confusion. The lab just got a new robot as an award from a previous competition:Robotis OP3. So, I was assigned to the Kid-Size team (kid size because it is a small robot, a bit higher than your ankle) to figure out how it works and participate in the upcoming FIRA Hurocup 2018. No one knew exactly how to use it; other student volunteers with more experience had some ideas ported from the previous version, OP2, but the framework for OP3 is different, involving ROS Kinetic, publishers and subscribers and C++. Because I was getting paid by the award, I had times of being by myself there, trying to figure out how everything works and getting guidance on computer vision (OpenCV) and movement animation. There were a lot of trials and errors, but it was very fun. Finally, we could make it work.

Unfortunately, but also luckily, the most experienced guy quit, so it allowed me to travel instead with another Kid-Size guy and two adult-size guys to Taichung, Taiwan. This was our qualification video

There was a lot of excitement! First time in Asia, representing Canada, seeing 3 months of work finally compete and getting to know people from all over the world. There were also some high expectations from us as Snobots (our official team name) has performed very well in the past years. Now the competition had more teams, old teams got strong, new sporting events were added but both me and my kid-size partner were new on this kind of competition using a new robot.

At the end, as Kid-size team, we got:

• Weighlifting - 2nd place
• Triple Jump - 3rd Place (New Event)
• Moving Target Archery - 4th Place (New Event)
• Obstacle Run - 5th Place
• Mini-DRC/Teleop - 7th Place
• All-round - Fourth Place

We were actually really impressed to get 4th place all-round due to our experience. This taught me that it isn't about knowledge, it is about persistence, focus, belief, handling stress, collaboration and teamwork.

After this amazing experience, I decided to stay as volunteer for the Aalab.