Team 192 - Simulations and Prototypes

Simulations

· When our team first met, we had a number of meetings during which we planned out our gaming strategy. One of our primary concerns was deciding which objectives to accomplish, and which robot should accomplish them. To model our various options, we drew a picture of the board on a whiteboard, located in our small building room. We charted out the location of each objects in black and used a blue marker to chart the potential paths of the CBC robot and a red marker to mark the Create’s path. We drew and redrew the various paths as needed, eventually choosing one which would score us as many points as possible without being entirely unrealistic. To this end, we decided to eliminate a couple of scoring objectives from our plan, such as recycling the fuel containers, which would make our CBC’s path too convoluted. From this diagram, we were able to get to work building specific attachments for each robot based on their predetermined objectives.

Prototypes

· One of our initial ideas was that of a piston-controlled claw attachment, called, simply, the “Piston Arm.” This arm would be largely controlled by the linear actuator provided in the LEGO kit, which would theoretically make it stronger and more accurate than our usual claw designs, which do not utilize pistons. We constructed a preliminary model of the Piston Arm to see if it would indeed be an improvement over the standard design. After testing this model on our Create robot, we found that although the Piston Arm was stronger than the usual arm, it was also much slower to close and open. We decided that, given the time limit of the competition and the hectic nature of the competition rounds, a slower and stronger attachment would be less effective than a faster and slightly weaker one, and this design was rejected.

· This year, we wanted to integrate sonar into our navigation strategy, as it would be more accurate to rely on sensors than guesstimating how far forward the robot needs to travel before it turns. We attached the sonar to our Create and ran some simple code to test its effectiveness. However, when we pinged the sonar into the wall, we found that there were too many reflections off of the ground and other robots for it to be of any use. While we may try to revisit the use of sonar, for now this idea has been effectively rejected.