HARPA Robotics Club (Old)
Like the idea of Robotics? See those Boston Dynamic vids and wish you could work on that stuff? Then here’s your chance! No need to be an expert roboticist or even knowledgeable in the basics of electrical or mechanical engineering to get started in Robotics. It certainly helps, but creativity, willingness to learn while experimenting and a drive to build cool stuff is far more important!
Starting Semester 2: The HARPA Robotics initiative at the Hanze Makerspace!
What: Informal robotics club by- and for Hanze students and staff
How: Build robots for an end-of-year competitive rescue arena challenge
Who: Open to all students (and staff) with an interest in Robotics (from any programme)
Why: To have fun with robotics, automation and creative engineering!
When: Weekly social build nights on (probably) Thursdays (starting when first 12 students sign up in semester 2)
End-of-year-challenge
To get us started for this year on working towards a goal, we decided to set a central challenge that we all work towards: a rescue robotics challenge!
Every team designs and builds a platform from scratch using off-the-shelf components (or not, up to you!) to tackle an arena-style rescue challenge where the goal is to retrieve a number of a evacuees from a number of tricky terrain types.
The Robots
How you want to approach this challenge is entirely up to you! Want to build an all-terrain 4×4 remote controled car with a gripper up front? Or a slow-and-steady tracked rescue tank with all sorts of fancy pathfinding? Maybe you’d like to build a custom drone that can pick up objects? All up to you! We help you as best we can to build a bot that can tackle the challenge. The competition element is just there for fun and motivation, but you can get as in to it as you want!
For now, the competition is focused on building remote controlled bots, but if enough teams decide they want to try their hand at autonomous navigation that is totally an option!
Speaking of teams: the expectation is to create teams from everyone signing up, at least 3 to facilitate a good amount of competition, while still being able to mix people from different backgrounds into each group for the sake of creativity, knowledge and social interaction.
Sign up now!
Sound like fun? Got a little time left over each week to tinker with cool bots? Then sign up below!
Don’t worry too much about being locked in or needing to know about all the required skills already. Our goal is to provide people already in the know with the opportunity to just build for fun, as well as allow beginners to learn about the essential skills to get started with robotics. It’s all drop-in-drop-out, which means that you can join and take a break anytime you want/need to.
Want to know more before signing up? Shoot us a mail at makerspace@org.hanze.nl or drop by!
