The zekrit ninja phatapult's strategy is to fling as many balls as we can over to our side. In the beginning, we had visions of erecting a giant wall through vehicles stacked on top of each other but then we realized that, though we might win with one of those, it wouldn't be as fun as if we tried something like flinging the balls over with a catapult.

We knew it probably wouldn't win us the competition, but it was fun to design and create. We decided that a catapult was the way to go and tried to build it so that it wall followed to the line, then line followed back and forth while twin scoops constantly picked up balls and delivered them to our catapult device.
As we continued to work on the robot, it became apparent that we might be able to use one scoop and a servo to load our arm and just turn around to get balls that were behind us. We found yo-yo string to work well in drawing down a catapult arm that was built up by legos and strung with multiple rubber bands. Everything seemed to fall into place and we had a working catapult by the time Assignment #1 was due and the robot came together pretty well

In the end, it seemed there still wasn't enough time, even though we'd been working since the beginning. There were things that we had to drop, including some of the more intelligent aspects of our robot like line following because it wasn't fast enough to allow us to go back and forth on the line much. Multiple trips on the line were very important if we were to throw enough balls to win. We ended up scripting most of our behaviors but our robot worked well nonetheless.

The Basic Strategy:

We orient ourselves using the light sensors and turn towards the opponent's side. We draw down the arm and move forward to their line where we run into their first ball, triggering the load servo to raise and load it into the catapult. We orient for firing and launch that ball over to our side. We turn back to our line and continue along it, drawing down the arm. We continue to hunt for the other balls, flinging them over to our side, hopefully faster than they can be returned. With our robot, we were able to go across the board this way about 2 and a half times, usually firing at least the first ball we ran into.

If we have a ball in our hands at 59 seconds, we'll try and fire it in order to get a point that can't be returned and maybe win the match.

Thus is the power of the phatapult.