GALEN BARRETT
WILL LARK
KWAME GREEN

( A.K.A. TEAM 50)
MIT
6.270 Autonomous Robot Competion


 



Well, we would show you our robot, but unfortunately our pictures haven't been developed yet. You'll just have to come back later, I guess...

However, we can tell you a little about it:
We were one of two teams brave enough to try using the treads included in the kits.  It took a little while to get something we liked though.  5th time's a charm!!!  Yeah, that's right, we tried 5 different chassis before achieving perfection.  The last one was built the day of impunding.  It really wasn't very hard to do though.  We used a modular construction.  All we had to do was attach the two tread assemblies together then drop the gear boxes in and make sure the gears meshed.

Our robot was built around a very simple concept: possesion means that when the robot is moved in any combination of directions in the x-y plane, a block will stay inside it.  With that in mind, we built a box that was open on two ends, then used sliding doors to close off or open up those ends when we needed to.  We took some advice from the T.A.'s when building the geartrain and made one with kind of a high gear ratio.  The gearbox had a 45:1 ratio.  After connecting it to the tread assembly, it came out to be something like 57:1.  Our robot was really powerful, and we should have used that to our advantage, but we didn't...  Our strategy was get the two side hackers and one of the low professors.

It performed a'ight.  We had a flawless performance in the qualifying round, then made some modifications before impounding.  Like almost all the other teams, we wish we had at least one more day...  We got to finals, then got eliminated in a first round double loss (score: 0 to 0).