Team Seven/Final Paper
Contents |
Overall Strategy
Team 7's strategy went through three primary phases that depended fairly heavily on our mechanical capabilities. For most of MASLab, we intended to play a low-ball-count high-ball-value game where we would not bother going after the ball release button and put as many balls as possible into the top tower. After a while, we realized that this would not be optimal if we were collecting balls thrown over from the other side, so we designed a two-hopper system that could differentiate ball colors so that we could put only our balls in the tower and throw the rest back over the scoring wall. Unfortunately, this strategy had to be simplified a great deal when the competition arrived, because we didn't have the time to implement the required systems. As such, we found that we could maximize our points by scoring over the wall, in which case which color balls we collected wouldn't matter, because gaining 20 points and causing the opponent to lose 20 points had the same net result. In the end, our strategy boiled down to getting any ball we could for the first 150 seconds, and then spending the last 30 seconds looking for the yellow scoring wall and attempting to score with all the collected balls.
