About Us
Welcome to the homepage of the 6.270 Team "Donner, Party of Four".
Our robot design, which uses four distance sensors, aimed to have the least needed calibration, and most effiecient orientation routine possible. Our robot would immediately start moving in whatever direction it could, and based on how far it went before it hit the next wall, and the known dimensions of the board, would know what orientation it started in. Our strategy made it such that this initially traveled distance was not wasted, as no matter which direction the robot initially faced, the first distance it traveled would get it closer to the skunk--our primary target.
When we first constructed the robot, we went for a design which included two ball ramps. This would theoretically make it simpler to release the balls, as all valid point ranges required at least 12 points--that is to say three balls on one ramp which would always be released. The other ramp could release one ball at at time, in various amounts in certain bins, depending on what was needed.
Very early on--assignment four or so, we found out the advantages of using multithreading. Our code reflects a great many generic structures which could be used in any robot, not just one for 6.270. Included features of our code are: a thread which collects sensory data, a pointer-based stack of goals, which could be shuffled as needed, and would use timeouts, functions that utilized PID feedback, and that would return error codes, navigation that planned movement in a stateless fashion, and code divided by function into several source files.