Robocon Workshop
Venue: N24 – DK8
Date: 28/9/2018 – 29/9/2018
On 28th September, I joined in a workshop held by UTM Robocon Team, an organization that participated in dozens of competitions each year and recently from “ABU Asia-Pacific Robot Contest 2018” in Ninh Binh, Vietnam. To begin with the workshop started early in the morning, around 7 am. However, transportation was provided but attendees must arrive at the bus stop about 10 minutes earlier. When I arrived there, I had to sign my attendance before entering the lecture hall.
After waiting several minutes for all the participants to show up, the workshop started at 8.30 am as planned. Since, most of the participants are new to Robocon and have absolutely no idea what they do, the team members initially introduced each and every member. Then, they started elaborating on their vision, mission and procedure to become an official member of UTM Robocon.
Next, from 9.30 am until 12.00 am they went ahead and gave us a comprehensive introduction on robotics. From my understanding, robots generally consist of 3 main segments, which are Mechanism, Electronics and Programming. Therefore, to produce a high-quality robot a team is needed to handle each main segment, so that the end result will be invaluable. Due to time constraint, the presentation only covers the electronic and mechanism portion of a robot because most people will have some trouble understanding on how to program a robot, the presenters decided to held a more thorough explanation on the next day.
On 29th September, the workshop started with the usual registration, a light breakfast and a brief summary on the topics covered before. Afterwards, they immediately gave us an incredible presentation on programming. Sadly, a lot still had trouble understanding but after numerous practices and examples, they finally figured out the concept and logic behind the complexity of programming.
Finally, they concluded the workshop by inviting a VIP to deliver an end speech and also announce an Autocar Competition for those who wants to join the UTM Robocon team. Overall, this workshop honestly opened my mind and gave me many new ideas to explore on.