Pete Miles wrote:
They way I look at it, the 3 kg sumo event is orders of magnitude more exciting to compete in. The crowds find it far more exciting to watch than mini sumo. For those people that spend a lot of time building super-class mini sumo's will get far more out of a 3 kg sumo for their efforts.
Its interesting - at the CNRG, the opposite is true. The 3kg class is pretty much a joke, with half a dozen robots that don't work very well. When I ran Seeker 3 last year, one of the Sharp IR sensors on the front broke off at the beginning, and it basically acted like a moronic robot, hopelessly running around the edge of the ring. It never went out, and that was enough to win third prize.
In Masters mini-sumo, behaviour like that gets you eliminated almost instantly.
As Lee (spacejunk) said, masters mini-sumo is incredibly competitive. Seeker 2 only won this year because of a particular software behaviour that I had programmed in - it is always looking for the opponent, even in the first second after launching it. They changed the start rules this year, and the second place robot (Slicer), which wasn't quite as flexible on the software front, got beat.
Jerome and I did a bunch of tests afterwards, and it is probable that his robot would have won had we had to start the "old" way. Seeker 2 is a bulldozer, and once it goes head to head with anything else the match is over, but its still vulnerable from the side or back.
- Jon