Team Members:
Craig Brophy (6-3, 18) - cbrophy, Tim Koch (4) - timkoch, YiOu Wang (5) - yiou

Labor Division
Craig coded since he was well practiced after a hard semester of 6.170. YiOu and Tim were on the hardware team, with Tim assembling the electrical components.

Strategy:
We designed a simple but robust robot that would consistently score around 10 points. It first orients and pushes the four balls directly in front of it into our scoring bin, to ensure at least 2 points. Then the robot drives around one side of the table collecting balls of the same color. Depending on the vote at the end of the round, we put these collected balls into either our scoring bin or our opponent's.

Outcome:
We preformed fairly well in competition, although we were never able to finish our runs as we would either collide with the other robot or get hung up on the wall during a turn. In the end we were 3-2, tied for 7th place.

Physical Build:
The robot had a simple horizontal design with vertical bracing. One motor powered each wheel, and a third motor powered the spinning ball grabbing. We turned and drove straight with a gyroscope. Distance was measured by shaft encoders in the geartrain.

Initial position and orientation was determined by an IR LED-phototransistor combination at three corners of the robot. These allowed us to know if we were on a black or white square.

Code:
You can see our code posted here:
competition.c
movement.c
gyro.c

Pictures:
Driver's Cab	Rear Caster	Color Sensing Unit	Robot Driving on the Table

site designed by tim koch