Structure

Our final design was not all that different from our original design except for a couple of fixes here and there. Fortunately, since David was an expert with legos, we didn't have any major design flaws. Pictures are worth more than a thousand words so just look at the picture of our robot to check out our design. But basically, we had a beautifully symmetric robot with 4 big wheels, two on each side, in the back and a smaller wheel in the middle. Dimensions were 1 ft. *1 ft. * 5 in. In the front, our robot had 2 gates that opened and closed like the claws of a crab. Just look at the pictures, you'll understand.

DK31 Front
DK31 Rear
DK31 Side
DK31 Top

Drive/Steering

Drive/Steering DK31 used a differential drive combined with a steering wheel in the middle. The steering wheel in the middle was powered by a servo which allowed the robot to have smoother and more accurate turns. We mainly used shaft encoders on the back wheels to monitor the rotational distance travelled when making turns, and driving straight. Also, we were able to "veer" - not drive straight, but lean towards one side - using the shaft encoders, by making one wheel rotate faster than the other.

Gears/Motors

DK31 had a 45:1 wheel ratio. We used two bi-directional motors to power each side. Our robot had very little noise and gear friction when driving - DK31 was a smoothie. DK31 was probably one of the most quiet robots in the competition. We had almost no problem with our gears compared to other teams. Whereas other teams had gears grinding and breaking, we never had a problem with the gears, as we followed the "book" in gear ratios and gear structuring.

Sensors

Sensors. Here was our robot's biggest flaw - no sensors. Ok, we used a few - we used leds and phototransistors (for finding out starting orientation and our team color) and the start light detector (for the start code). We had many ideas - we had two digital sensors within the gates (claws) to determine whether we had a ball, and we had planned to attach digital sensors on the back and the side of our robot to give it the ability to detect and follow walls more efficiently. Unfortunately, because of an error that occurred 5 hours before impounding (and we couldn't find the cause for 3 hours), we couldn't incorporate our ideas and the numerous sensors in our robot - so essentially, our robot lacked a lot of knowledge. But thanks to the claws, we were able to follow walls very effectively - the opening of the claws gave the robot an effective turning and wall-following (sticking to the wall rather) ability. However, making use of more sensors would have made our robot definitely smarter and capable of winning.