Bot Web – RoboChat

Let’s be a big family

BotGirls – 16-0375

1st author: Christina Grasl 2nd author: Manuela Gross

Bot-Girls - (16-0375) Bot-Girls - (16-0375)
Vienna, Austria Vienna, Austria
cgrasl@student.tgm.ac.at mgross@student.tgm.ac.at

Bot-ball plays already a big role at the TGM. The big them. A drawback of this idea is that the team has to
question is: can we somehow improve the organization somehow find the money to finance the workshops.
of bot-ball? At first we're going to tell you about our A potential option is to request a certain amount of
general ideas of improving the process and the money, starting from 30 participants, to cover the
organization throughout the whole year. Furthermore expenses.
we have some recommendations how to make bot-ball Perhaps it could be managed to assign a
more popular and to animate people to inform
group-/workshop-leader for each team, who helps
themselves about it. concluding we are going to talk
about the improvement in our on school, like the and support his/her team and would be the contact
opportunity to take part in some workshops for person for the period of time in which the workshop
volunteers (which could be fee-based) and the chance is taking place. The teams should get familiar with
to get to know the other teams a little bit better everything quite early, that is why we would
appreciate the workshops to be after the beginning of
the school year, because at that point of time the
I. INTRODUCTION (HEADING 1) learn costs are not that high. It would help a lot to get
This paper will try to explain some ideas and an in-depth introduction about Bot-Ball and “What
the possible realization for future Bot-Ball. Of is Bot-Ball?”. Numerous of people are new to the
course there are some thoughts that have some topic area and a good, detailed explanation would
contras and could be quite difficult to realize. make things a lot easier for them. On another day
However, they will still be explained in the paper. there could be a workshop where the mechanical part
The team perhaps has some more ideas for the of robotic gets discussed, the pro and contra sides of
general implementation of events and meeting points robots, how to build a good “fork” or a good gripper,
for throughout the year. Other than that it would etc. Probably a few events and tournaments can be
be really helpful to have a website about some more planned during the year.
detailed information about Bot-Ball, the tournament
and a possibility to have contact with the other team
members.
II. I. WEBSITE
II. CONCEPT/DESIGN The team came up with the idea to create a website,
One of the main ideas is an additional workshop for because there are a lot of benefits seen in that.
the people who are beginners and are new to the The fundamental principle is the easy
robot scene. A lot of people have to learn everything access to data related to the Bot-Ball tournament.
right from the start, so a workshop for those people Although there are some other plans.
would help them a lot. There could be a workshop
There could be general group introductions, every
where only the people who really want/have to learn
group who joins the tournament records a video in
all the basics. Also it would be great to have a
which they introduce themselves. The goal we are
workshop for the more interested and experienced
striving with that is to get to know each other better
participants, so they could learn a lot of more things
(even before the tournament). A pretty interesting
about robotic and probably could show how talented
thing would also be to find out something about the
they are.
schools the other teams attend, especially from the
There surely are a lot of people who would
participants from other countries. We think that we
love to learn more about Bot-Ball, for those it would
should not see each other as rivals but rather as
be quite interesting to get the chance to hear more. It
family, as a group of people who share the same
may be possible to invite past winners (also from
interests. We ought to hold together.
other countries) and organize a presentation held by
Staying in contact with the other team members after There should be also the option to share pictures.
the tournament seemed like a good idea to the team. These shall be taken during the workshops, but can
That’s why there should be added a chat-feature to also be private photos (of course in conjunction with
the website. robotics). Sharing videos should also be possible.
An application which allows to chat with This is just a side project since the videos are for
either the other teams, single team members or the entertainment.
Bot-Ball moderates. There should be a immediate contact between the
More than that there was thought about some playful team members and the Bot-Ball team. There should
details like some robot emojis and some other robot be access to the necessary data & emails just by one
details. Assuming that botball is mainly for teenagers click on a window.
and that the young people are ever so often on their
mobile (and general on the internet) an app will be The most important part of the website is the access
useful. It should only have some small, main to the PDF’s and the documents. Potentially there
methods. The app has to be easy to use and develop. could be some introductory videos considering that
A user has only access to the application if someone wants to practice at home.
he own the login-rights which everyone gets send per We want to strengthen the „Bot-Ball-Family“. The
mail. contact between each other is really important for us.

That is an example of how the website could look like. We want a simple and pretty design and an easy
handling. The homepage-name is just a proposal. We thought that Bot-Web is pretty appropriate.

II. II. GENERAL you can sign in with the username and password.
On the top right you can see the Pria-logo. After the first time logging in the password
Underneath that there is put the Login area in which can be changed. The button next to the
username and password is for the login- it is a good chance to get to know the other ones
confirmation. before the tournament.
By clicking on it the username and the This chat is called RoboChat, this is a name which
team-name will appear on the left side (under the describes it in a good way.
website-name). There is an option to chat as a whole group
If the username is clicked, the group-menu will show (with another group) or a single person with another
up: one. When you click on the name of your desired
chat partner (in the group chat) you immediately get
to the group-site of the chat-partner you just clicked
on. That is all the information you can get about a
single person.
This allows all to have also contact after the
tournament and that has the highest priority for our
team. We want to begin and end the tournament as a
family.
By the use of this chat there can be communicated
and established contacts in advance. The Chat has a
really simple principle. It is built up easily and has
not got a lot of features.
We also added the possibility to use and send emojis,
which of course have to do something with robots.

That is how we would imagine the basic principle:

This is the group-menu

II. III. GROUP-MENU

In the group-menu the most important
information about a team is listed and managed. It
exists to see what the other teams can see from your
group. The fields are no obligation which means
there has not to be a group picture, even though it
would be nice. If someone want to edit the profile he
have to click on “Edit the profile”, there it can be
changed. When you are done you have to click on
the save-button. Here are two of the emoji-designs:
The field only shows up on the main page. That
means if someone clicks “X” in the upper corner he
will be send back on the main page.

This is an easy design, everyone can easily

use this, but there will be a ‘Help’-Button in the main © Christina Grasl
menu, there can be read a little text about the website
and the use of the website.

Additionally it would be great to get in

touch with a Pria employee in an easy way, like one
II. IV. THE CHAT single click on the main-screen. You can as well start
Another concept that we thought about was to add a chat with a Pria employee.
a Chat. In this century everything works with Finally there is a feature which allows the groups to
communication (via the internet). We are extremely upload pictures. We would like that in order to have
interested in the contact between the groups, since a look at the other people´s life and lifestyle, to see
there will be a lot of people from all around the world the people behind the robots. The maximum video-
duration is 5 minutes.
Maybe there are some Bot-Ball participants which At first there will be seen the pictures
would contribute themselves to the project (for which are recently uploaded. When the ‘load more’
example: the designs of the emojis). There are some button is clicked, the page will load a few other
down sides when it comes to the realization of our pictures.
idea, but we think that with the cooperation of the
others we can manage to do it. There will be a white big button with the name
‘back’. This button takes a user directly back to the
main page.

II. V. PICTURES
There should be a function to upload pictures. Of The idea of the picture page:
course, this pictures should be pictures about
robotic.
With this function, the pictures from the
users will be uploaded on the main page of the
website, so everybody can see them. The other
users can post comments to this pictures. The
comments get checked, and if the comments
disobey the guidelines it gets deleted.

There will be a big button with a little pencil, when

a user clicks it, a comment can be written. Everyone
can see who uploaded this picture, and in with team
this person is.
There will be no like and dislike button,
because every picture is beautiful and great. If any
user sees a picture that disobey the guidelines, the III. TOURNAMENTS
user can report this picture by sending an e-mail to There should be some more little tournaments
the botball-team. during the year, it will be great to have a little
competition only for the school-students. So they
The team thinks that the picture upload function can have some fun till the real, big tournament gets
would be great, it would be very personal and it started.
would give the other teams a little view in the life
Probably there can be a tournament only for the
of their opponents.
girls, maybe this will bring more girls to BotBall.
There could also be a boy tournament.

Of course there are some small prices for the first

three teams, this prices can be supported through
the sponsors. So probably you can win a little
workshop to learn more about robots.
Maybe there can be a camp during the summer, in
this camp all teenagers and kids are welcome. So
BotBall can be published in the world.
Not only technical schools want to work
with robots, there a few more people who are
interested in this. So these camps will be very
useful for them. In the camp you can make new
friends and at the end of the camp, there is a big
tournament with big prices.
Of course, this camp isn’t for free.

On the main webpage, a user can click onto a

symbol which can get him to the page on which all
picture will be uploaded.
 IV. CONCLUSION
The conclusion is that we in generally
speaking want to distribute Bot-Ball a little more
on our school.
We want to manage that with the help of
tournaments in veach department and department
vs department. We want to organize a yearly
TGM-tournament.
Furthermore we want to add the workshops
for beginning and advanced people which would
hopefully affect the performance at the
tournament in a positive way. However, we think
our main idea – the website – is going to have the
most positive effects. There can be a lot more
added to the website, but the things listed above
were the most important for us.

V. ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The whole team wanted to thank all of the
persons which supported us and helped us when we
had some problems.