Mea Culpa is a robot designed with one purpose in mind...to win the contest with a maximum of 24 points. Furthermore, Mea Culpa relies on differential steering, one of the simplest steering systems available. Our special feature is the D.ARMS (arms that have light sensors capable of differentiating between hackers and students). Also our robot would pick up the hackers and push away the students.
Mea Culpa's structure is made entirely of Lego(TM). Our robot was made very robust due to the efforts of DrDaniel. All critical structure's are braced in numerous places. Furthermore, our gear trains are fully enclosed within the robot, and all axles are supported in at least two separate areas.
Mea Culpa is outfitted with a number of sensors to collect data about it's environment. Perhaps the most important, and the most mundane of these sensors is the starting light sensor. This sensor picks up the signal that tells Mea Culpa that the contest has began.
All of this is controlled by the RoboSkiff computer. The Skiff is a 200MHz StrongARM based controller, with 16MB of RAM and 4MB flash memory. The Skiff runs the ARM version of NetBSD. User code is written in Java, and uploaded via the serial port.
Our code is designed to be simple yet robust. According to our strategy we had to use Java intelligently to get to our goal. Some problems arose from measurements on the actual board (shaft encoders didn't work as expected…) so our whole coding and strategy failed. After 60 seconds have elapsed, Mea Culpa shuts off power to all motors in accordance with 6.270 rules.
Mea Culpa was created by Nikos Michalakis, Daniel Vlasic and Spyridon Michalakis, all students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology enrolled in 6.270-Autonomous Robot Design.