Team Nine/Final Paper

A MASLAB Tale or: the Souls of Three Engineers in Exchange for One Robot

TEAM 9: Officially “It’s Implied” (known in the streets as: “Blood Sweat n Tears”)

ROBOT: Officially “Rolo” (affectionately called “Hiccup”)

I. Overall Strategy

    Of the four types of points that could be scored – short distance, long distance, green box, and possession – the type of goal we chose to work toward was the long distance shot. Our choice was not only due to the highest point-yield of long distance balls, but also because we believed that it would not require too much of a stretch in our mechanical design. Other important aspects of the physical robot we considered were speed and ball capacity.
    As for the software design, we opted for a state machine approach and incorporated threads to coordinate the many tasks given to the robot. We took advantage of the python bindings available in OpenCV (Open Source Computer Vision) libraries for image processing functions.