Team Seven/Final Paper
Contents |
== 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, the strategy allow the maple to be lighter and have less need for debug.
Go Big or Go Home
The key objective for us is to win all out in mechanical design. We felt that the common design of a ball collector, an Archimedes Screw, and three servo sorting gates are too overused in MASLab. Thus we came up with a marble maze and the rule that we will not have any MBF on our final robot. To complete the design, we implemented a rainbow LED strip onto the robot. Though the reliability of the design was difficult to achieve, we continued to push on the effort, knowing that this would be our golden ticket.
For the Lolz
The team's key objective is to have fun. Therefore, we do not stress that you have to be in lab every day. If you need to take a day off, take a day off. Also we entertain any bazaar and crazy ideas for our robot. List of ideas we have considered includes: Snakebot, 100RPM_Spinning_Top_Bot, Model_Rocket_Ball_Dispensing_Bot, and many more. Finally, the team resided in the same living group, and during Maslab, we would spend some of our down times together and build up the team.
Conclusion
In the end, we sent out for an alternative winning condition and achieved it with the average results. Our design sparked interest in more audience in the open house than other robots (Yes, we kept track). The robot achieved its job in scoring at least 1 point in any game, and the design proved itself to have even more potential if more time is given to fix reliability problems. Lastly, the team would like to thank Venca for their recognition.
