I didn't post much the last few days because the Great Firewall of China blocked my blog and when I used a VPN, all the websites loaded really slowly so I will be summarising my trip from Day 2 -3 here.

Day 2

On Day 2, we spent the entire day setting up our robot for the competition on Day 3. We had to rebuild my FireFighting Robot as it was dismantled for transportation to China. Once we unpacked our luggage on Day 2, we started assembling the robot. From there, we started fine-tuning the robots, adjusting sensors to calibrate them to the lighting, and testing our code to improve the robot.

After running some tests on both robots, we realised that the Sumo Bot Ramp was too flat, and even if the ramp managed to get under the opponent robot to make it easier to push the robot off the field, it would barely make it easier for the Sumo Bot. Therefore, we decided to improve the ramp, and with an idea coming from Nathaniel on how to improve the ramp, we managed to make the ramp effective and not disrupt the efficiency of the sensors, such as the Ultrasonic Sensors, which were a problem since most of the ideas blocked the Ultrasonic Sensors.

For the FireFighting Robot, we managed to code an alglorithm to move to the circle, aligh itself to the centre of the circle and extinguish the fire.

Day 3

On Day 3, we woke up and took the bus to the Ice Skating Ribbon, where the RoboRave International 2025 Beijing Competition was held. Our group, as well as other groups from SST, took a photo at the banner before heading into the venue

On this day, the Sumo matches went pretty well, and we managed to attain 16 points on that day itself (Max 24). However, for Firefighting, our robot did not detect the candles and drove straight into them, resulting in wax that damaged our ultrasonic sensors as well as wax in the blade of the FireFighting Fan. Since there was not enough time to replace the sensors on that day, we just decided to hardcode the robot and managed to get the robot to extinguish 1 out of the 4 candles. Although that is not a very good performance, I think that we learned a lot of strategies from the other teams on how they navigate around the field, how they detect candles and extinguish them.

A few photos