Team #23 : Dorko Arundhati Singh & Jaspal Sandhu as featured on the front page of The Tech   6.270: Autonomous Robot Design Competition Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, MA January 2001

Here is a description of this year's contest. You can also get more information from the course website.

I. Our strategy

II. The story of Dorko

III. Results

IV. Lessons: what would we have done differently?

A link to our source code

I. Our strategy

In choosing a strategy for this contest, our emphasis was on simplicity and reliability. We felt that a robot that performed a simple strategy CONSISTENTLY would fare pretty well in the competition. To this end, we determined that our strategy should be to capture the easiest ball quickly and then return to our own side and defend one of our balls from other robots. Therefore, our strategy was to orient quickly, race to the opponent's territory and capture the ball on the same side of the table as our start position. We would then speed back to our territory and defend the ball of ours on the same side of the table. Another, more personal goal of ours was to have a robot that would be an entertaining crowd-pleaser.

II. The story of Dorko

Given the contest theme, Masters of the Universe, we couldn't help but revert to the '80's cartoon of the same name. Our favorite character from the series was Orko (more info at http://www.he-man.org). By merging that character's name with a reference to the MIT community in which we were to build this machine, "Dorko" was born. A name alone, however, would not be enough. We also wanted an actual Orko action figure to sit on our machine. So we scoured the net until we found one for auction on Ebay. Some 2 weeks later, Orko arrived, having survived his 1400 mile journey from Overland Park, KS to Cambridge, MA (via US Priority Mail). Days later we would mount him to a servo which was attached to the machine. During competition, after dropping our arm on the ball, Orko would turn side to side and peer at the audience while the bright LED's in his hands turned on. Upon reaching its own side, the machine would begin to belt out "Louie Louie" from the controller board piezo beeper. In response, Orko would begin to dance to the familiar beat and the LED's in his hands would begin to blink alternately.

What is the origin of Orko? According to the He-Man legend, when Prince Adam and Cringer were young, they were both were out playing one day and had wandered far from the Royal Palace. A terrible storm broke loose and Prince Adam and Cringer found themselves lost in the Tar Swamps. They weren't alone, however, as Orko was there as well. Because of the great power of the storm a temporary doorway had open between Eternia and Trolla, pulling Orko through it and trapping him in Eternia. Prince Adam called out for help, because he and Cringer were stuck in the Tar. Orko heard his plea for help and went to help them. Orko pulled a Magic Medallion out of the "O" on his chest and commanded the Magic Medallion to help them. A tree branch turned into a hand and pulled Prince Adam and Cringer out of the Tar and put them on dry land. But Orko was careless and dropped his Magic Medallion in the Tar, losing it until the episode "The Creatures From the Tar Swamp" (as I have explained before). Because of Orko's bravery, the Royal Family awarded him with a medal, adopted him,and made him the Court Jester (which wasn't an insult by any means).

III. Results

We made it to the fourth round of the competition, finishing in the top 24 from a field of 58 teams. Our first loss, to "Sebastian", would likely have been a tie, had it not been for a malfunction on the part of their machine. They were using treads to drive one of their mechanisms; when their treads broke, their machine was disabled and directly in our path. This prevented us from bringing our ball back to our side (we made it as far as the neutral zone but were unable to push them out of our way). Thus, the game ended in a 2-1 victory for Sebastian. In our final round, we lost to "Don't Worry", the eventual champions. The design we chose was no match for the strategy, nor the speed, of "Don't Worry". We expected our strategy to get us through 4 or 5 rounds and to hopefully gather some crowd support for the singing & dancing Orko. We finished 2-2 and definitely met our goal of getting some crowd support for Dorko, as evidenced by our picture on the front page of The Tech.

IV. Lessons: what would we have done differently?

What would we have redone if we had the chance to reconstruct the robot? The main component which we would have changed were the treads. Treads are a reasonable means for actuating robots, but not when dealing with Lego robots. In order to function properly (in order to turn and drive accurately), the treads needed to be extremely tight. They were so tight, in fact, that the friction induced by these tight treads made ours one of the slowest robots in the contest. This was particularly problematic in that our simple strategy depended on speed. Additionally, the treads were so tight that they warped the axles to which they were attached. Lastly, Lego treads are very delicate and not meant to withstand the rigors of full-contact robot competition. Two robots in the contest fell victim to breaking treads. While we were fortunate enough not to experience this, we did break our treads on occasion during testing - putting them back together was no minor task.