Hello all! This time, as promised, I want to share a little news with you about a recent event that showcased fischertechnik. Studica was involved in hosting the 3rd Annual Virtual Robotics Challenge at the Ontario Skills Competition in Waterloo, Ontario Canada in May of this year.

This year the fischertechnik ROBO TX Training Lab set was used as the hardware platform for the challenge. Participating teams of students were required to use Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio (MRDS) and VPL (Virtual Programming Language) along with a simulation environment to program their robotic models. The challenge included first to program a simulation where the participants navigate a robot partially through a maze section, and then have it detect and follow a line path before returning to the beginning.  Once the simulation was successful, the team attempted to do the same using the MRDS hardware services to control the actual fischertechnik ROBO TX model (i.e., the “hardware”).

The fischertechnik simulated services were developed with a lot of help by Carel Vanleeuwen of the Netherlands. Though both the simulated and hardware services were still only in a pre-beta version, the students were able to use them to achieve their challenge goals for the competition. Currently, work is under way to further refine these services to bring them to the next level. We look forward to sharing our progress in future blog entries. Meanwhile, here is a short video clip from the Virtual Robotics Challenge, so that you can catch a glimpse of the teams in action:

That’s all for now, but as always, if you have any questions about anything in the world of fischertechnik, or perhaps if there is something you would like me to address in future ft blog entries, please feel free to drop me an email at [email protected].

So until we meet again, happy building!

Author: Lance Zurek