Isaac Dinner '02, Dylan Hirsh-Shell '03, Phillip Kelleher '04

6.270 Autonomous Robot Competition 2001

Team #52: "The Dude"

picture

 

Facts about our Robot

 

Physical Features: Our robot consisted of a green base platform with a smaller, rectangular platform above this. On top of the higher platform is a car with 2 oddly shaped "arms" attached to the front. The big arm resembles an "I" shape when extended. The small arm is approximately six inches in length and straight. Both are attached to servos. As well, the IR beacon is mounted on a rotating servo to spin as desired.

 

Size: Our robot takes up nearly the full 1'x1'x1' in every direction.

 

Electronics Used: Our robot uses all three servos, 4 motors, 5 Phototransistor/Led Combinations and 1 Photoresistor and 1 Breakbeam Sensor.

 

How our robot Fared

 

"The Dude" fared relatively well - making it to the 5th round of the competition. Our robot performed more or less as expected by easily defeating moving robots and leaving duels with robots that similarly went for the center to chance. As such, all 3 moving robots we encountered were easily won by us. Both of our losses came against similar types of robots which went for all of the center balls. Our last loss was particular sad for both teams as all 3 balls in the center were blocked in resulting in a double loss.

 

We exceeded our expectations by building such a robust robot, however were very disappointed in a draw which forced us to go against center oriented robots early and often. Our strategy works flawlessly against the style of the robot which made the top 3.

 

Our Strategy

 

Our strategy is simple - divide and conquer. The car sitting on top of the platform rotates towards the center ball using color sensors under the green platform. Once oriented towards the center the car drives off of the platform and the small arm should hit the center ball onto our side. After this the large arm drops down and locks into place on the other side of the board, effectively creating a great wall across the board prohibiting teams from bringing balls back to their side. On top of our car is a deflection plate to knock the last 2 balls effectively back to our side. This strategy is impeccable against robots moving to our side. Against robots of a similar style it leaves much up to chance.

 

Our code is very simple and more or less tells our car to move the right spot. There is a small amount of backup code for correction. Shaft encoding is used to turn the base, but not drive the car.