On December 11th, 12th & 13th Tribotix presented a 2hr presentation/workshop for 180 Year 9 Girls. The girls were in Newcastle as part of the 'Summer School 2007', which is a program ran by the University of Newcastle to encourage young girls to consider careers in Science, Engineering and IT.

We tried to make to make the presentation/workshop as interesting and hands on as possible. The highlight was a game of 3vs3 Robot Dog Soccer. We provided 6 Robot Dogs made from the Bioloid Kit, we then modified the CM5 to add Bluetooth. Using a PC with a LabView VI and a USB Bluetooth Dongle the girls where then able to remotely control the robot dogs.



The video above shows some of this game, as well as me (I made it on the TV, my 15 seconds of fame) showing the girls our robot bear.

Was the game of Robot Dog soccer a success? Well, yes and no - the Robot Dogs legs kept falling off. There is a weakness where the 2 brackets connect (via 4 M2.5 screws) - these screws work there way loose as the Robot Dogs 'jump' around. This could have been fixed by some loctite BUT these are Bioloids we re-use so loctite was not an option. It was alot of fun though ....