In the end, after nearly 48 hours of constant work in the lab, we actually got a robot that worked. There were a few hurdles along the way, however:

• Spinning in place, folded: U.B. had a notoriously difficult time spinning while the hinge was closed. We needed the robot to spin in an area 18" square, which meant the robot had to spin practically around it's center. Ultimately, after trying many permutations, we found that if we set the wheels to a certain angle and run them at a certain speed, we get fairly acurate and reproducable turning behaviors. Testing this particular feature was terribly amusing, as the robot managed all sorts of unpredictable behaviors, including falling down.
• Hitting the first ball: Also difficult, U.B. never seemed to line up properly after hitting the back wall, and thus was not aligned in a way that it could drive sideways and hit the ball. This turned out to be a software problem, which we quickly fixed -- once we finally realized what it was.
• Timeouts and encoders: As with every team, we needed to set values for the shaft encoders, such as how far from the back wall to line up with the first ball. Another important timeout was how far from the back wall to spot the barrier was supposed to be; too far and the balls are moved and registered as the barrier; to soon and the wrong plan will always be selected.
• The wall: Now and then the robot would drive too close to the wall. One wheel would get stuck, and the other would rotate around it, turning the robot into the wall. We tried to fix this by having it drive farther from the wall than originally planned, which appeared to work most of the time.
• The trough: Sometimes, our plans would work, only to have three balls jammed between the robot and the lip next to the trough, unable to be pushed in. We didn't realy have a fix for this, only a hope that we'd get lucky, or when U.B. drove toward the opponent's side, it would roll the balls into the trough. Only we never tested that possibility.
• Falling off the table: When the batteries were fully charged, the robot had a tendency to fall down when it's servos changed direction. It caused some problems in lab, but we slowed down the robot in the code and made sure it had stopped moving forward when it adjusted it's steering, and this seemed to stop the problem.

Round 1.

What happened: The first and qualifying round was a dissapointment for us and a great many other teams. Unexplained Bacon started on time, opened but at a strange angle, and then didn't back against the back wall completely. When it moved forward to align, it did so incorerctly (because it didn't back up properly), and completely missed the first ball. When it moved back and forward to find the barrier, it was so off-kilter that it hit the barrier off-center such that no switch contacted, and sat there grating its wheels for the rest of the 60 seconds.

The reason: Getting stuck on the barrier was not supposed to happen; the actual result would have been for the robot to timeout, assume Plan C, which was wrong in that case, but it would have driven around and bumped into things a lot, at any rate. It turned out that we had faulty code: we checked the timeout, but never incremented it -- so U.B. just waited forever.

Qualification:

After some serious bug-fixing, we decided that Unexplained Bacon was ready to give it a try, and asked for a qualification round. The T.A. placed our robot in the South orientation on the White side, which ironically was our default side and orientation for the robot to assume if anything went horribly wrong. It started, accurately oriented, and pushed in the first ball, qualifying us. It then went on with the strategy, properly selecting it's plan. However, once it started driving around the barrier, the right wheel got caught on the wall, and the robot drove right into it. We qualified, but we were disappoined by not being able to see our robot score more than one ball.

Round 2:

What happened: In this round, U.B. oriented entirely wrong, spinning around nearly 270 degrees (when no orient spin should have gone more than 90 degrees). When it unfolded, it jammed between the barrier and the back wall of the board. Of course, with this exception, it did everything else just fine -- just 90 degrees off. It drove sideways (and got stuck), drove forward toward the wall on the far side of the trough, spun it's wheels for a while, and then drove toward the enemy side. Which, oddly enough, was the wrong direction it should have driven in since it was against the wrong wall. Luckily, it didn't fall off the table.

The reason: The entire problem was involved in misorientation. We believe that the new paint work on the tables was a very large part of this: 1) the table was a lot shinier and the colors brighter, which may have foiled the IR sensors, and 2) because of the new paint, the traction between the board and the robot's wheels was much higher than expected, allowing it to spin farther.

Of course, because it detected the entirely wrong orientation and side, there was a very high chance we accidently placed the head of sensors hanging from the robot in the wrong place. We may never really know.

Conclusion:

Unexplanied Bacon ended Round 2 with two losses, and was eliminated from the competition. We had failed in both our goals:

1. Win the competition
2. If the competition cannot be won, make it to the televised round and have the robot fall off the table and shatter.