The “great” title does only deserve to be bestowed upon those who don’t stop at a certain point just because they are satisfied with their current work. Despite every achievement that has made people acknowledge ICHIRO as one prestigious team, we still go the extra mile to improve our robots performance and make progressive change.
Back before the year 2017, we hadn’t found a way to construct our own robots and ended up buying ones from a platform called Darwin. Due to their complicated and unstructured language of programming, we found it hard to continue our research. Therefore, an innovation to produce our own robots was declared in the early year of 2018. Since then, we build our own program from scratch which eases us in modifying the system.
Constructing our own robot’s system has led us into some significant changes, especially on how our robots think. Every year, we endeavour to find the most efficient way for our robots to think and have much more understandable logic to accomplish their work. The improvement can be seen in how our robots identify an object. Our robots used to distinguish their target based on its color gradient. But since it’s considered less accurate, we found a new method for a robot to identify its target by following the color pattern.
Having our attention fixated on the electronic part of the robot, we know that some small but continuous change has been made. In order to set the arrays of cable into its utmost efficient arrangement, the board which acts as one of the foundations has experienced several changes in its size and mechanism. Each year, we tried our best in minimizing the board and modifying our system to allow more room for managing the cables.
We also have spent years of research on our robots’ main power source. It is obligatory for the robots to have a battery placed in their bodies with the aim that they could function well. At the moment that the battery ran out, the power was shut down and the robots could not even move their fingers. This caused quite a problem since it needed a considerable amount of time to make it work back on. To prevent the occurrence of this problem, we have discovered a new breakthrough which was described as a spare battery with cables linked to the main battery. This spare battery has replaced the old method of using adapters.
The world of our research doesn’t revolve only around the work of the robot’s brain nor the electronics part of the robot. There is also an established advancement affecting our robots’ body design and system. Having experienced a bitter accident, where our robot’s neck was broken due to a severe fall, we brought up our idea of making a front cover that serves as a shield for the robot’s head. Since then, in the purpose of finding the most effective one, the design of the front cover encounters a slight difference each year.
All of our robots’ body parts were connected and could influence the motion of one another for there is some kind of connector called a servo. Unfortunately, the usage of servo hasn’t reached its perfect peak in the connection between the robot’s body and its sole. The connection between these two parts was easy to get loose since the friction from walking was fairly high. Considering the urgency of this problem, we came up with a rounded shape item called bearing as a solution. This bearing helped strengthen the connection between each body part and allowed us to spend less time fixing it.
Einstein once said that the measure of intelligence is the ability to change. This great quote aligned with ICHIRO’s vision, which was clearly stated through the passage, that letting the time move forward without a certain breakthrough would be the exact example of being incompetent. Through our journey, from nothing to something, these changes have helped us develop to be everything.