Yesterday, the founder of Youth Fusion – Gabriel Bran Lopez – joined Vigilant employees over lunch. He brought along a robot for a lunchtime demo to motivate Vigilant employees about the upcoming 2012 FIRST Robotics challenge and the regional in Montreal.
Students from a high school in the greater Montreal area built the robot with the guidance of a Youth Fusion mentor from ETS University in Montreal. The idea was to get employees excited about the event Vigilant Futures is sponsoring in a few ways; first as an event co-sponsor along with other Montreal-based companies, and second through sponsoring the robot-build at Lasalle Community Comprehensive High School.
On October 6, 2011 at a banquet for the Quebec regionals, Ernst & Young Canada will award its Entrepreneurs of the Year Award. Gabriel Bran Lopez will receive a special citation as the Social Entrepreneur of the year.
This special citation is a unique category among the awards. It’s given in recognition of an entrepreneur whose achievements have driven large-scale social change and improved people’s lives or quality of life. We all know about Gabriel’s work and the success of Youth Fusion, so it came as no surprise to us at Vigilant Futures he would be recognized with such a prestigious award.
We are constantly in awe of him. We’re humbled by his modesty and proud to work so closely with him, Youth Fusion, and the students they help every day.
Youth Fusion announced today something everyone here at Vigilant has known about for a short while! One of our co-founders, Arvind Ramanathan, was appointed a board member on the Board of Directors for Youth Fusion. We’re all pretty excited, especially Arvind.
Every Vigilante works with Youth Fusion in one way or another, but no one tops Arvind. He’s fully committed to Youth Fusion and the Youth Fusion kids. He’s involved with Youth Fusion in so many ways we’re glad he got the recognition he deserved for his hard work!
Youth Fusion already boasts some pretty big board members but we’re sure Arvind’s astute business acumen combined with his passion and that of Gabriel Bran Lopez’ – founder of Youth Fusion — to motivate teens to stay in school will serve Youth Fusion well.
The day started off with the conclusion of the qualification rounds before lunch and the main event which began at 1:00. As the previous day, the team decided that with the difficulties we had with our arm (although functional and still capable of scoring at the highest level) and with the lack of a mini-bot deployment system, that we would stick to defensive play.
Some Vigilant colleagues arrived minutes before we hit the field in our final qualification round. Unfortunately, we had a problem with the battery and the robot was lacking power despite a full charge. This was disappointing for the lack of performance as well as it being what we we’re certain was going to be the only opportunity to show off our bot to the ’Vigilant brass’. But to our surprise and great excitement, we made it to the quarter finals. The team immediately got to work on tweaking what we could. By this point there wasn’t much we could do that hadn’t been done the two previous days, but we decided that as we weren’t using out bot to score we would disconnect all electronics for the lift and arm systems in an effort to maximize the potential of our battery.
Our bot was paired with two relatively strong bots which were happy to have us as a defender. Our robo-trio fought our way through the quarter undefeated and moved on to the semi-finals with great excitement.
In the semi-finals our trio was up against a team lead by bot 2051, undisputed best bot in our division run by a team with many years of experience and several regional championships under their belt. We focused on blocking this bot in particular, but their superior speed made this difficult at best and we lost the first round. Given this challenge ahead of us on the game field, we stripped as much of the lift system and arm and anything else that could be removed from our bot so as to lighten our load and give us a little extra speed. Unfortunately, 2051 was still a fair bit faster than we were and we weren’t able to match their speed and we were eliminated in round two.
This concluded Henri-Bourassa High School’s 2011 participation in the First Robotics competition. Still in good spirits for getting further than any other Quebec team, we packed up our robot, dismantled our pit and went out to celebrate.
It’s been another long day, albeit a little shorter than yesterday. It was still a good 14 hrs from the time I left this morning to the time I got back to the hotel. The qualifying rounds are largely done and will conclude tomorrow before lunch.
Update on our robot: Our hook at the end of our forklift-arm wasn’t functioning well, so we replaced it with something much simpler. Although we can still score on pegs of all levels, we decided that our robot is best served as a defender or as a support to our more aggressive teammates. This also means that chances of us continuing beyond the qualifying rounds are slim. But the team doesn’t seem to mind. It’s unfortunate that our driver only began to figure out the best way to play defensively after most of the points have already been tallied.
Over the course of the day, our robot performed well and didn’t suffer the mechanical problems so many of the other bots had. Although we worked on the minibot and deployment system in the limited time between matches, we weren’t able to complete it. This isn’t overly disappointing as there are only a very small number of robots which have managed it properly. Some teams kept their robots so simple that the only thing they can do is play defence (no autonomous mode, no ability to score, no minibot)!
During the official competition tomorrow, the two most impressive robots to watch 1114 and 2054. These two not only perform with remarkable speed and accuracy under user control, but their autonomous modes go well beyond that of all the other robots in that they are able to consistantly place the tube in their claws at the beginning of the match on the highest peg and then go in search of a second tube on the ground and virtually always place it on a different peg at the same height before the 15 second timer is up!
Day one is done and it had it’s ups and downs over the 11 hours we spent at the Mississauga Hershey Center. The status of the Henri-Bourassa robot: the arm is having difficulties due to a combination of design and programming issues. Autonomous mode isn’t going to happen. The minibot may or may not make it into the final robot, but we’ve passed inspection and are ready to begin tomorrow’s qualifying round in whatever shape we start in. We can do additional work through the qualifying round.
Walking around and looking at the other robots was a little frustrating as it was apparent that so many of them had many more man hours of build time available, greater funding for parts, larger resources and facilities…and in many cases a fair bit more experience. But that’s isn’t the case for all of them as some are having difficulties even functioning while others haven’t managed to pass inspection yet.
The atmosphere is pretty good as each team is willing to help out the others regardless of the status of their own robot.
After they kicked us out of the robot pits at 8 PM, we all went for dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe.
Now, 15 hours after I left the hotel this morning, I’m back and am now ready for a good night of sleep! Tomorrow is another day.
