*A picture of our little robot*


This year's Theme has a table that looked like this:
The objective was to possess or jail as many black blocks (hackers) as
possible and to get as many professors (red) or students (white) onto our own campus.

Our basic strategy was to first of all have a minibot shoot out from
the jail area onto the pyramid, and then extend two long arms so that
when it backs up it would sweep the two professor blocks on the pyramid
down to our campus, then the minibot would cease functioning, so that
it would also get in the way of the other robot in case it wandered
into our campus. Afterwards our main robot would go on to one side and
acquire the known hacker block, then turn towards the enemy's campus,
and proceed to its jail, while picking up and sorting any blocks that
come our way, to maximize our scoring chances. Upon reaching the
opponent's jail we would open a servo door so that the professor and
student blocks would be in the opponent's jail unpossessed by us. That
would give the enemy quite a few negative points in addition to the
ones that we receive for possessing hackers!

After our team has decided on a strategy for our robot, which was later
named chuck West, Victor was assigned to the building of the robot. Using
lego pieces, he tested different structures and bracing techniques to
build strong and useful parts for our robot. The best advantage of
using lego is that we didn't have to have a detailed technical drawing
before we build the parts. We were able to repeatedly build, test, and
rebuild lego parts until they functioned as we needed. This gave us
ability to test several designs of each of our main parts, including the
sorting mechanism, the sweeping arms, the gear train, and even the whole
robot in general.

When all the pieces were finally built and finalized, we put the parts
together to form a single robot unit. This was proven to be harder than
it first appeared to be. Because of the physical limitation of the size
of the robot (1' x 1' x 1'), different parts did not go together without
modification. Therefore, major reconstruction and compromises of different
functiong parts were made to create the whole robot.

Lastly, after the robot was built, we glued sensors and motors to their
places. This, in the beginning, was not successful because the
functioning distances of the sensors were not known. After trial and
error, however, we were able to get the sensors to work in a relatively
reliable manner.

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