ROBOCON KENYA 2009

The ministry of higher education has organized a Robot Contest between kenyan universities and middle level colleges. The contest will be based on the need to provide sufficient food to the Kenyan communities for their upkeep. For this to be achieved the food must be transported from the granary to different communities by a community leader referred to as “MFADHILI” (our robot in this case). MFADHILI is to ensure that the best food reaches his community. Given that all communities living in Kenya must benefit, MFADHILI has to beat the odds and feed his community with the most nutritious food. The theme indicates that for this country to realize the aims of vision 2030 then food security is mandatory and automation technology can be used to achieve this food security. Therefore the theme of ROBOCON KENYA 2009 will be “ROBOTICS FOR ENHANCING ACCESS TO A HEALTHY DIET”.

The task of competing teams is to implement a Robot that will follow a straight line to a rack that has food stuff in it, pick the food and deliver it to the community. The line to be followed is a straight white line 7 cm wide. The racks are placed 6.5 cm away and extend 50 cm upwards. The Robot should not exceed 30kg in weight and should be able to fit in a packet of 50 by 50 by 50 (cm).

The University of Nairobi team of which I'm part assembled some two works ago and have been working on their 'MFADHILI'. Details of their progress, from start to finish, I will post later on probably after the contest for obvious reasons. I will however keep posting crucial updates on concerning the Contest. Besides the competition, the team members look forward to develop practical skills in mechanical and electronic design, stepper motor and micro-controller programming and the need for precision and accuracy in Engineering design. Precision and accuracy will play a big part when different divisions of the team bring together their components for the Robot to be finally assembled. The team has an advantage of having the Fabrication Lab at their disposal. The UON team is working under Mr. Joseph Makokha and Mr. Vincent Musau who is also the ministry's national adviser on Robotics. Besides making the Robot, the team will also participate in a high school outreach program of the Fab Lab.

Attached with this post are pictures clip of the UON team at work