Notable features
- Our robot features a set of claws
driven by a gear train up front that is designed to actively grab balls
from a 12" radius around the
robot and bring them in for safe keeping until it can deposit them.
- We also have a movable rack driven by a servo
that takes our collected balls and raises them over the
claws' gear train
and the game board's wall to dump balls into the goal. Although this
feature was never
fully implemented,
it is unique in that it uses rubber bands to straighten the rack once
it starts moving.
- The robot also has a spinning tire on
the back to activate the flag box. This feature was also never really
implemented.
- Our navigation is primarily done by an
on-board gyroscope but also with shaft encoders handled by
breakbeam sensors
that figure out how far one wheel travels with respect to the
other. If the two wheels
do not travel the same
distance, our robot compensates by speeding up one of the wheels until
they line
up again.
Notable problems
- Our HappyBoard died for four days
during the last week of the competition. This gave us nothing to do for
for those four days and
stalled the completion of our bot greatly. Thus, we were unable to
implement
most of our functionality,
nor were we very competitive.
- The Sharp distance sensors provided to
us were not as accurate as we had hoped, nor did they have the
resolution
we were
looking for. This made it difficult to enable our strategy or locating
where we were on
on the board at all
times using a distance sensor on each side of the robot.