Team 52 - The Team You're Playing Against!!

(except we never made it to the final round)

Team Members: Christian "Lego's Burn My Fingers" Rodriguez, Anthony "The Infinite Loop" Quivers, and Clinton "The Soder Inhaler" Blackburn

 

Strategy:

Our strategy consisted of quickly attacking one of the two colors in such a fashion that unless the opponent could spread the entire field, we would be able to sink all of that color excpet two we protected into the voting booths, and then place those two we kept into our scoring zone. This would basically guarantee that our color would be the winning color, and we would have the two balls which would score us the win. We also planned to predetermine the direction in which our opponent went so that we could go the opposite way and not crash during our ball collection process.

Design:

Our robot began as a central kicker (back rectangular piece) that caused crossed over pieces (XXX) to extend outward and become longer (><><><). On the end of the extender were solid pieces which would push balls forward as extended. Unfortunately, we didn't have enough gear reduction and so the motor couldn't push the thing forward with all the balls in. The sides were attacked and these were basically where we housed the 75:1 reduction gear train. We used longer pieces (and some creativity) to create a mount across the center where we could house the unit itself, and then added doors in the front which would open and close depending on what we were doing.

Code:

Well, main problem with our robot is that the code wasn't completed and functional until close to the end which means a lot of the design faults couldn't be corrected, but basically it just makes the robot drive around to different coordinates, turn, open/close the doors, and push the ball pusher. Our coder decided to create some sort of infinite crc loop of sorts, but of this I know not much more. Point is it ended up working out and some point, so that's ok.

Outcome:

Well, our robot had great ideas behind it, but not nearly enough debugging time. Had we had more time to correct our faults I think we would have had a great competition robot. We had two loses before finals hence never achieving fame and fortune.