Team 28: Notorious Big Fine Robot
Contest:
The Notorious Big Fine Robot (BFR) is a robot built for the MIT 6.270 Autonomous Robot Competition. 6.270 is a hands-on, learn-by-doing robotics course for MIT students, run entirely by volunteer student organizers. Teams of two or three students design and build autonomous microprocessor-controlled robots out of LEGOs in three weeks. Each of the 60 teams submit one robot to compete in the contest at the end of January.
Our Strategy:
Due to the layout of this year's contest board, we decided that we needed to head straight up the middle to get at least two of the professors. To do this, we needed the robot to orient, turn, and run up the center very quickly to beat other robots with the same strategy. We decided to slap the two center professors back to get some points, we then continue to go forward to try to make a jailbreak.
Construction:
To make the robot pretty fast, so we built it with a 27:1 gear ratio, double driven. It had two arms in the front which were attached to stretched rubber bands. The arms were fastened with a piece of LEGO, which was pulled away but a string which wound around a motor. In this way, the arms snapped back to slap the professors onto our side.
Results:
Our design failed in the first round simply because it wasn't done yet. The arms were in front of the robot and couldn't plow the blocks out of the way, so it got stuck. In the second round, one of the switches on the rear of the robot was bent, so that when it backed up into the wall to orient itself, it never tripped the switch, and it just sat there and spun. Oh well...
Team Members: