Team Seven/Final Paper

== Team 7 ==

Tips for future teams

1. Identify what you want and keep everything else simple.

2. Always have backup, specially for anything the staff provided.

3. Prepare and don't hesitate to fall back to Plan B.

Full Report

Identify the Need: This is IAP. Therefore, the team has decided that its objective is to have fun.

  1. Have fun
  2. Build a crazy robot
  3. [Maybe] score 1 point.

Thus everything we design revolves around these objectives.

Givens:

  A. Robot has to interact with balls of multiple color
  B. 3 Minutes Game
  C. There is an opponent working against you
  D. Environment is pseudo-random and artificially generated

From the givens and the objectives, we can extract some basic principles.

  1.  KISS (Keep It Simple, ...)
  2.  Go Big or Go Home
  3.  For the Lolz.

KISS

Don't over complicate your strategy. If it gets the job done, it is good enough. This is very true in our EECS design. In the computation side, most of the sensory and filters lies in Maple. The tablet is responsible for camera vision and interacting with the botclient. Also at week 3, when we realized that wall following is not a critical element, we decided to drop distance sensing to a contact switch. Though we were still improving the reliability of the sensor,

Thus in our mechanical design we went for an outrageous and most likely inefficient compare to the standard ladder.