Challenges

What Went Wrong...

From a coding point of view, more timeouts/better failure management was needed. As previously mentioned, timeouts were incorporated in the code but more, better, and more strategy-changing was needed. Our first match consisted of us going around and jamming into a robot, and that was it for the remaining 100 seconds. We won for our fast exploration, but it wasnt the most impressive round (Yet better than the second...read on...). Ideally, Ali Baba should have tried to get out (which we actually expected him to do, or hoped he would. Again, our timeouts didnt account for all scenarios).

Our third gearbox, for the central back spin-the-gearbox horizontal motor, wasn't the most stable. The fact that the axles were vertical made it more difficult, and it ended up a bit loose. Half an hour before impound of our robot, the motor failed and we had to fix the gearbox and replace gears. Due to the irregular structure of the gearbox some parts had too much pressure or were not very well connnected to others - which led to a 40-tooth gear severely damage and one tooth being completely chipped off. We had to replace that one and fix the gearbox. We could not prevent this damage completely from happening to the second gearbox, but we were able to minimize it. What should have happened was a complete rebuilding of the gearbox, but we had no time at all.

Another late problem was the motors connection to the happyboard being lost - we had to re-solder it.

The connection of our front hand to the servo also failed us a few times.

In our second battle of the final competition, the back gearbox didn't work. Needless to say, we couldnt spin the gearboxes, so couldn't gain territories, and thus couldnt get or drop balls and lost. However, it wasn't that the motor had lost connection with the gears, which was our initial thought. After a collision, a small piece ment to help hold the axle in place had gotten loose and managed to (as unlikely as it seems) jam itself in the gears, preventing the motor and everything from spinning. This was an extremely easy fix, we returned piece to its position and capped it with a small piece so that it wouldnt get loose.

After that the robot functioned fully and we had a good round but lost. If it wasn't for that piece somehow jumping in the gearbox...