Quest for Self-Realization

Our contest this year consisted of blocks that were randomized and blocks that were set in position. The object was to keep students and professors on our campus and put the hackers off of it. For Contest details, see the 6.270 Page.

Unfortunately, this year's contest was full of problems, mainly the motherboards. The "new and improved" Java-enabled "Skiff" boards were not quite up to the challenge, and had some fabrication problems. Besides the untolerable delay until the final week, the boards fried left and right because of "wrong resistors." So, we switched the final week to the "Handy Board", a MIT special board that is light and powerful, but has less motor jacks. We were forced to remake our robot from the speed demon to a smaller version with only 4 motors. The board was programmed in IC (Interactive C), which was enough like C except for some annoying cutbacks like no switch statements, and unfortunately, the motors created lots of noise. We had 3 servos, 2 for steering and one for the arm that drags blocks. Unfortunately, we found that the electronic noise made by the motors caused the servos to twitch at unfortunate times.

Final moments before impounding... we change our code to include groundlight sensors. We would really like to test out our new code. Unfortunately, our shaft encoder broke on us, and we were also forced to switch boards because one of the motor ports fried. So, we were set back for the last 4 hours, and were unfortunatley unable to test out our code. So this was our biggest mistake. With other bad luck combinations, we still did okay.

And if you want our code: The faulty part lies only in the order of executions, not in the actual code logic, so don't worry if you're looking through the code.

• main.c (our main procedure)
• robot.c
• strategy.c
• sensors.c
• orient.c
• calibrate.c
• moving.c
• misc.c
• files.lis

Two pictures: Both of Yao and Hiro. Prasad is sitting down next to us.