Hungarians on Mars: Team PAS

Magyarok a Marson, meaning Hungarians on Mars, is a robot building competition that our team had known and loved for years. Several of us were returning competitors, but the 2011 edition, held as the 6th Applied Engineering Sciences Competition, was the first time we entered in this category as team PAS.

We built the rover from light parts that you can find at home, which made the construction fast and simple. The chassis is made of medical spatulas glued together in an elongated H shape, the drive comes from four HS311 continuous rotation servos, and the wheels are jar lids: their diameter was just right, giving the robot a comfortable ride height to roll over the cables on the course. Since development time was short, we picked the controller we knew best and trusted most, the LEGO Mindstorms NXT. It has plenty of limitations, but it is a ready-made system where you just upload the program and plug in the motors.

The ground station controlling the robot did not run on a PC: it was an Android app, written in App Inventor, a simplified, Java-based graphical programming environment. After adding up the points of all the rounds our team finished 7th overall, which made us the best high school team of that year in the competition.

The full, detailed story of the robot and the competition is written up in Hungarian on a separate page: mam.somaerdelyi.net.