Winning (or.. "would have won") Strategy :)
Our strategy is to build the fastest and simpliest robot possible so that the
chance of our robot messing up would be minimized.
Our master plan is to have the robot push the ball cloest to the ramp in, and then
race down the table to the other end and hopefully block the other robot from scoring any.
During lab, we timed that it takes about 10 seconds for most teams to score one ball,
therefore, we improved our robot until it reaches the other end of the table by 7 seconds.
Technicalitites:
First, we calibrated each eight possible orientations and wrote the code so that the robot
rotates at most
180 degrees in order to push the first ball in. And then, we employ the shaft encoder
and send our robot at full speed down the table along the ramp. Meanwhile,
the robot extends its arms (one powered by a motor and the other by a servo)
in hope to maximize our blocking perimenter. IR tracking
program is then turned on and our robot should follow the other robot while
hugging the wall (ie. moving parallel to the other robot) so that they can only
score if they toss the ball over our robot, which we dismissed as a possibility.