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Originally posted by Atahualpa
Kuci
Pictures
Kuci
Pictures
My friends had the cameras
but I shall demand copies! This was for a robot competition called BotBall. A picture of the board is attached at the bottom. (The robots on it aren't ours.) The object was to score points, by various means. You get 1 point for every "trash" (the little black foam cylinders) or "recycleable" (the water bottles) in your dump (the flat area in the lower right). You get 5 points for every trash you get in the trash bin (the bin with the green paper behind it) and 10 points for every recycleable in the recycle bin (the bin next to the trash bin). You get 10 points for each orange ball on your side (in the flat area) and 30 points if you get it in your "yard" (the little blocked off protrusion on the left of your side). You get 30 points for having BotGuy (the plush toy) on your side and 50 for getting him in your yard. The bar separating your side from the middle area is raised sometime between 30 and 35 seconds unless it will disturb one of the robots (e.g. if you have your robot put a little piece of itself over the bar in that time period, they won't raise it).
We had two robots, one (later named DrunkBot) that swept all the trash and recycleables into the dump and then (attempted to) pick them up and put them in the correct bins. This last part was actually coded hastily in the car on the way to the competition. The first part worked pretty consistently (except when low power caused one of the motors to fail, making our robot careen to the right or left). The second part didn't work at all. This is why we called it DrunkBot. The claw simply didn't open unless it got force open by the robot driving itself. It would run itself into the trash, try to lift of the arm, and then back up and try to drop the trash (that it had not picked up) into the receptacle (again running into the trash). However, this DID result in many of the trash getting flipped into the bin, giving us a lot of accidental points. In fact, the first time this happen, the announcer guy said something like "and the robot has gotten one of the trash into the bin" and I went "That's not supposed to happen!" The second robot, KnockBot, waited 20 seconds, then moved straight forward (it had one drive motor hooked up to two treads) and used a very, very torqued-up motor to raise an arm sideways, which knocked off the orange ball.
We ended up making it to the quarter-finals (top twelve out of I think sixty or seventy) and then we lost
It was hilarious though because all the other robots that got that far were really awesome looking, and you just watched them work perfectly and smoothly, and then you look at ours and it was WTF is that thing doing?Here's the board:
Attached Files
All hail to DrunkBot 
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