I’m really proud to share that our team took first place at the BotOlympics robotics competition. I competed alongside Rodrigo Pato Nogueira, João Pino, and Carlos Pereira, and it ended up being a fun side-quest to pull off together.

The core challenge was to develop an autonomous robot capable of navigating a physical maze.The competition was split into various subtasks, ranging from standard time races to a mode where our robot actually had to track down and capture another robot in the arena.

When it came to the hardware, it helped a lot that the brain of the operation was based on the ESP family of microprocessors. I was already pretty familiar with ESP boards from tinkering with my own electronics and automation projects at home.

Next year, again? :)