1) Mounting the CBC sideways upon a large wheel. The wheel would travel everywhere on the game board, scattering obstacles. The slopes would provivde the wheel with momentum, decreasing the need for motor power. The giant wheel would provivde a unpredictable obstacle for the opponent. However, this concept was rejected by our team becacuse it would be too unreliable to utilize realistically.
2) Windshield wiper-like arm for collecting, sorting, and storing poms. This long, bent arm would be able to use the same apparatus for three functions, allowing us to put the different colors of tribbles in their appropriate areas in the minimum amount of time.. However, the twisting motion required to move the arm is too complex to create efficiently with motors. Thus this idea is rejected.
Good ideas:
1) Getting a robot out of the starting box by moving directly over the PVC pipe. This would give us a speed advantage, seeing as going around the pipe as the opponent might would take precious seconds. With Botguy as such a prized object, point-wise, time is of the essence. The pipe, while difficult to overcome using wheels, can be surmounted using caterpillar treads or a raised inanimate platform. This bot would feature a large bin in the front so that it can collect the blue balls. It will also have a camera in order to detect the blue balls, and put itself in the best position to grab them. This will be a very dangerous bot because it will be able to score 180 points( with the three times multiplier from bot guy) very quickly. It will also be able to do some damage to the opponent's end of the board as it grabs the blue balls. We will definitely use this design because Botguy is a three times multiplier. Therefore it is worth more points than any other object on the board.
2) A claw a with metal arm for obtaining Botguy. As stated above, Botguy is highly important on this setup as he is a score multiplier. Both teams will attempt to acquire him at the same time, so we must be the first to him. The best way to achieve this is to extend our reach using a large arm with a claw large enough to acquire Botguy. It is difficult to make a lego structure stable enough to support Botguy's weight, so we will need to use our metal parts for this arm. This arm may also be used to retrieve the blue balls, as they are similar in girth and texture to Botguy. This will be a very difficult task because we believe that most teams will go for bot guy. Therefore we must be able to make a bot that is fast enough and accurate enough to grab bot guy before the other team does.
3) Dividing the goals of the two robots by
areas of the board. The Create will have domain over our hill and
the half of the valley directly adjacent to our hill, as well as
Botguy. The CBC will deal with the rest. In this manner, the create
will be able to quickly score points which we can rely on obtaining,
while the CBC will obtain points which the other team would normally
obtain, allowing us to make it harder for our opponents to score
points while also enabling our robots to score more points than they
could if we restricted ourselves to our side of the board.
4) We had the dimensions to the starting box, but when we put our bots on the table they didn't fit. Our bots were too big. We needed to change the arms.