10 - Lessons Learned
This was our first year competing, so we tried to take a few precautions to avoid some painful lessons learned. Bringing spare components helped. Writing things down while we worked also helped. Despite this, there's always an opportunity to learn something.
Putting a rover in an obstacle-filled environment without some means of detecting obstacles is a gamble. No matter how many practice runs you complete without colliding, every run still comes with a risk of ending abruptly. That risk happened to come to fruition on our final lap. With more time we could have made Bebop more resilient. Needless to say, we'll have to devote more time to handle risks like this in the future! For now, we walked away only slightly bruised.
Putting a rover in an obstacle-filled environment without some means of detecting obstacles is a gamble. No matter how many practice runs you complete without colliding, every run still comes with a risk of ending abruptly. That risk happened to come to fruition on our final lap. With more time we could have made Bebop more resilient. Needless to say, we'll have to devote more time to handle risks like this in the future! For now, we walked away only slightly bruised.
On the bright side, there was an even greater lesson to be learned: Competition is a really good thing. This competition got the four of us together to pull off something pretty decent. Having a deadline and a shared goal created the perfect opportunity for us to learn new things and have something to show for it! Best of all, we got to see what other people from other parts of the world had to bring to the table.
We all had a great time and we'll definitely be back next year. Stay tuned!
We all had a great time and we'll definitely be back next year. Stay tuned!
Last Update: 30 November 2013