Team 57's 6.270
page
Our Robot's name is Mars Polar Lander.
It has large yellow eyes and a bent green baseboard scoop. We had
a lot of fun building Mars Polar Lander, but
ran out of time to debug it. We think that it would have had a good
chance at winning the contest if we had finished. Due to some unknown
bug that seemed to have introduced itself since we last touched the code,
we did not score any points at all during the final rounds, though we won
our qualifying round with a robot that seemed to do almost what we wanted
it to do. In retrospect, perhaps we should have kept our qualifying
code. On the the other hand, the new code seemed to work allright
the last time we tested it (though we did not try the last code on the
contest board that night, we could not reproduce the tests we did do with
the code that was locked in our robot for the final contest).
The biggest problem, and our downfall, was driving. Tested separately,
our sorting mechanism worked flawlessly for sorting any block that entered
it, and there was only an occasional problem with another block jamming
the mechanism. Not only did it work well, but it worked almost right
away. Therefore, if we had run over any black blocks during the round,
we would have scored those points (our gate mechanism also worked quite
well).
Our Final Strategy:
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Orient with light sensors in 4 directions
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Turn to the right or left direction using turn calibrated at start of round
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Linefollow to the corner line crossing
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Turn towards other side of table, picking up hacker block in the process
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Proceed to next line crossing, using linefollowing, and proceed toward
the other side of the table, picking up all the blocks in between in the
process.
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Continue around the square on our side of the table in this manner until
near the end of the round.
-
Open the good block (professor and student)
gate, releasing those blocks.
In the event that this was successful, we would have next added the simple
step of stopping on the jail and releasing the black blocks, perhaps leaving
our good
block gate open the entire time in order to prevent dragging them to our
jail.