Home
Hello EEE Students and welcome to the First Year Great Egg Race, more commonly known as "FYGER." First things first: don't worry, it's not an actual egg race - the name of this competition actually comes from an old BBC television series of the same name!
Over the course of three 3-hour lab sessions you will be working in your tutor groups to develop a robot to compete in an obstacle avoidance challenge using the robotics simulator Webots. At the end of the third session you will submit a robot and some python code to control it, and these will be entered into a competition where you will each compete, in your tutor groups, against one another to complete the challenge in the fastest time! We will publish the results as a league table on Blackboard and will also provide you each with a video of your groups robot completing the challenge afterwards. There may even be a small prize for the winning team!
Teamwork: Demonstrate team working skills by successfully developing a robotic system in simulation.
Design: Use basic engineering design principles by specifying criteria, testing, evaluating and updating designs.
Practical: Develop a Python program from code samples and additional online resources.
Practical: Test, analyse and modify robot designs in simulated environments.
Communicate: Share technical information between team members.
The aim of this activity is to:
- Work in your tutor groups to design a robot capable of navigating a simulated environment autonomously
At the end of these lab sessions you should be able to:
- Demonstrate team working skills having successfully developed an obstacle avoidance robot within your tutor groups
- Use basic engineering design principles by specifying criteria, testing, evaluating and updating designs
- Developing Python code to control a robot
- Test out your robot designs, analyse results and modify accordingly
- Share technical information with other team members
The lab sessions are scheduled as follows:
- Monday 5th October 2020 (Autumn Semester Week 2) 1-4pm
- Monday 12th October 2020 (Autumn Semester Week 3) 1-4pm
- Monday 19th October 2020 (Autumn Semester Week 4) 1-4pm
We will kick things off each week in a short Blackboard Collaborate session, starting at 1pm on the dates shown above. You can access these sessions either via the EEE126 course page on Blackboard (see the "Blackboard Collaborate" link in the Course Menu on the left hand side), or via this link*. In these whole-group sessions we'll give you a brief reminder of the task at hand and provide any further information that you might need. After that you'll be able to disperse into your tutor groups to work on your robot and the code that will allow it to succeed in the challenge! I (Tom Howard) will be available for the duration of each session to provide any support and answer any questions you may have, so if you need any help then please ask!
*Note: In order to access the Blackboard Collaborate sessions from the link above you will need to sign in using your sheffield.ac.uk account credentials.
Can't access the EEE126 course page on Blackboard? Fill in this google form and we'll get it sorted for you.
We hope you'll attend the Blackboard Collaborate sessions as a way to touch base with us, and the 3-hour lab slots are there for you to dedicate some time to work on this within your tutor groups whilst having access to myself (and maybe some other academics too) to ask questions and get support. Ultimately though, you are free to work on this challenge whenever you want to, and you should discuss this within your tutor groups to determine what works best for you as a team.
All the instructions for the FYGER challenge are provided in this Wiki (see the table of contents in the sidebar to the right) and you should therefore use these pages to guide you throughout. If there is anything that is unclear, if you need more information, or if you'd like to give us feedback then please add a comment to the Padlet that we have set up. The Padlet is embedded into the FYGER page on Blackboard (University sign-in required), but you can also access it here.
Tell us what you would like us to cover in the Blackboard Collaborate sessions: Enter a comment in the second column on this Padlet if there is anything in particular that you would like us to go through during the lab sessions!
You need to do some "Pre-lab" work ahead of the first session in Week 2 to get yourselves set up with Webots and become familiar with the software. This will allow you to get going on the challenge much quicker within your tutor groups during the lab sessions. See the Getting Started page for more information. After this, we have put together a couple of Pre-Lab Exercises for you to have a go at if you want to. While it isn't essential that you complete these, they will help you to become more familiar with Webots, increase your skills as a roboticist and will - ultimately - help you to develop a more advanced robot for the final challenge, increasing your chances of winning!
EEE126: FYGER - Team Robotics Challenge
2020-21 Academic Year
Dr Tom Howard | Multidisciplinary Engineering Education (MEE) | The University of Sheffield