Seattle Robotics Society, Space Elevators, Windows Embedded Devcon Sumobot Competition & Asimov

What an interesting weekend... We're going to be running a Sumobot competition at the Windows Embedded Devcon https://www.windowsembeddeddevcon.com - so, to get a feel for how these competitions run and to pick up a sumobot fighting ring from Pete Miles (author of Robot Sumo: The Official Guide - https://doi.contentdirections.com/mr/mgh.jsp?doi=10.1036/007222617X) I spent most of Saturday at the Seattle Robotics Society (they meet every third Saturday at Renton Technical College).

I was expecting to just see some sumobots fighting, before the competition got started there was a presentation by a 'guest speaker' on a Space Elevator project - https://www.liftport.com/ - this turned out to be extremely interesting, they even had a working model of how the space elevator might work - the project reminded me of a book I read some time ago, written by Isaac Asimov, called “Fountains of Paradise“ https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0446677949/ref=lpr_g_2/002-8176146-4360057?v=glance&s=books quite an interesting read - I'd be interested to see how this project progresses...

Anyhow, back to the Sumobots, the competition was great, most of the sumobots are equally matched in terms of size and power (some used a magic substance on the wheels to get better traction) - since the Sumobots are programmed to 'seek and destroy' the opponent the most interesting aspect of the competition was the differences in programming algorithms used in the robots.

Right, back to programming my Sumobot to do something interesting... perhaps I should enter the next SRS competition...

- Mike