Hungarians on Mars: Team Építő Kockák

Magyarok a Marson, meaning Hungarians on Mars, is a robot building competition I kept coming back to over the years. This time every team had to use a set of fixed components (six DC motors, two batteries, servos) and figure out the rest from there. The mission was to drive across the rocky Martian terrain and pop the balloons matching the team’s colour in as little time as possible.

Our six-wheeler robot was built from laser cut and 3D printed parts, with four of the wheels individually steered by servos and a custom suspension that helped it follow the uneven terrain. The brain of the robot was an Arduino, with another one in our controller, the two talking over NRF24L01 radios with WiFi as a backup channel for redundancy. I was mostly responsible for the software, which came with a twist: the controlling interface was unknown until the night before the race, so we built an adaptive controller and fine-tuned it right before the race began. Since none of us were university students any more, Team Építő Kockák was not qualified for the competition part of the event.