6.270 Team 10 Design

Design

Our design philosophy was all about speed. We tried to score as many points in a short amount of time and then attack the opponent to prevent them from scoring points as well.

We decided the fastest way to score points would be to quickly pick up the hacker to the left of our jail, thereby scoring 2 points then picking up a professor that will eventually be dropped off in the opponents jail, thereby scoring a minus 9 points for the opponent. As an added bonus, we would attempt to knock another professor back on our side while picking up the first professor. This would be a total of 14 points that we would score if everything went according to plan.

The key to this design was the pickup mechanism. Our design introduced an ingenious method employed by three pairs of gears with rubber bands stretched between them. A block would enter through the bottom of the robot, and be squeezed between the first two sets of rubber bands, providing enough friction to pick up the block and with help of the third pair of gears, place in a holding bin or the gears would stop to hold the block in a place which would allow us to spit the block back up.

The kick back mechanism employed to knock the professor block back on our side was an arm using rubber bands to hold the potential energy and a servo that kept the arm in place until the desired time.

All these design ideas were for naught however, due to the simple fact that we couldn't pull off a 90 degree turn with any regularity. More on that in the performance section.