Introduction: A Robot I Built for 2008 World Robot Olympiad Open Category

About: I am passionate about anything and everything engineering and physics. I am interested in much of chemistry and biology and I enjoy most art and craft + cooking and baking. I have completed my bachelor's in me…
World Robot Olympiad 2008 open category "saving global environment" it won the junior high school runners up award held in Yokohama,Japan

please have a look at the robot i built in 2009 which won first place in Korea here
https://www.instructables.com/id/A-robot-i-built-for-2009-World-Robot-Olympiad-open/

for the video of the robot in acion please look here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3FVdTbJrtw

The robot is designed,built and programmed entirely by myself from scratch
 the robot uses 4 Lego NXT,2 RCX, 22 motors and about 10 sensors

the mission is to actively patrol, or be stationed in a forest with a high risk of forest fires
it uses temperature and light sensors to prevent false positives of any fire, although not meant to fight a full bloomed forest fire, ever small fire it puts out prevents a potential disaster, not to mention the amount of co2 dumped into the atmosphere in forest fire.
 overall i was not too satisfied with this project as locomotion was a BIG problem, partly due to the competition rules limiting me only to lego parts in the national level competition. But I should not complain and thus i went through redesigning the whole robot 7 times in 6 months, experimenting with tracks, tires, and even a hexapod. At last i ended up with a design using 6 wheels where the motor and wheel at the four corners could be steered individually, however i ended up with 2 of the  Lego axles(used to rotate the motor and the wheel for steering) that snap right when the judges where about to start judging 
 

as seen in the video (uploading.....please wait) the robot picks up litter too, however it would not be practical in the real word, however if scaled up instead of picking up litter, it can potentially be used to haul loads of soil into the fire or move obstacles from its path.
 please not the robot seen in the video is the robot used in the national level competition, actual robot used in Japan has vastly improved. the final robot can be seen in the slide show