LEGO Mindstorms NXT Sumo Robot Competition

For the past two years I've been assisting schools in my area to develop and implement robotics workshops and curriculum activities. The most popular activity is by far sumo robotics.

The goal of a sumo robot match is to push the other robot(s) out of the ring, however these competitions I run are less resrictive than conventional competitions. The only rules for robot building are:
1. You can only use parts from the kit provided.
2. Your robot can't be longer than half of the sumo ring length (~50cm).
3. Your robot must be fully autonomous - so you can't make it so you can control it during a match.

The match rules are:
1. Robots can start face-to-face or back-to-back, but they must face each other directly (or as directly as possible in 3+ robot matches).
2. The first robot to have one of its wheels go outside the ring loses.
3. If the robots are locked together and the referee declares that the match looks unending then the match is a draw.

The competition went as follows: Of the 9 participating robots, each robot will face every other robot in a face-to-face round and a back-to-back round, where each round is to the best of 3 matches, and each round won earns the winner a point. In the event of a draw the round goes up to best of 5, etc.
The robot with the most points (i.e. wins the most rounds) wins the competition.
In the event of a tie-break, all robots in the tie-break are put into the ring back-to-back for a final match. Whichever is the last standing wins the competition.

The robot with the silver spiked ramp won the competition, but I don't have all the footage.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• sumo robot
• lego
• mindstorms
• nxt
• robot
• sumo
• education

[bigguy55100]

i would have whent with tracks,low center of gravity,and worm drive. :)

[holyhell5050]

@bigguy55100 Sounds reasonable :) somebody did go with tracks earlier in the year, and the only problem they had was a difference in forward thrust. In a head-to-head the wheeled robots tended to push the tracked robot back, so in terms of brute strength the tracks weren't as good as what one would expect.

The key to a good sumo robot is mostly in the ramp, although a low centre of gravity would surely be helpful.

[bigguy55100]

@holyhell5050 oh yeah,did they go straight drive from the motors or did they lower the power and gear it down?

[holyhell5050]

@bigguy55100 I got them to experiment with gearing, but not all of those taking part could manage it the same. So for the sumo robots they all went straight drive from the motors and their focus was on building reliable frames for flipping and trying out different programs. I don't have the video but one of the kids developed a seeking program using the ultrasonic sensors: the robot would spin on the spot and then charge when it saw the other robot. Quite effective actually :)

[darren1998s]

im impressed with the high level of enginuity cool!

[holyhell5050]

@darren1998s They did come up with some great ideas given the limited time they had to build their robots :)

[coolbuddywin]

2:37 to 2:52 is awesome

[coolbuddywin]

the coolest is the claw one

[coolbuddywin]

you spin my head right round right round....

[kbradner112]

do you have plans for the winning robot?

[pimonspie]

how do i make an arena for sumos