The Contest

We bring you now to the not-too-distant future. It is a future where the transformation of our society from agrarian to a modern industrial utopia has been fully achieved. Cities are massive, layered constructs, the pinnacle of efficiency and space usage. Their inhabitants must, however, be fed.

Plains states speckled with homely farmhouses have been replaced by vast rectilinear tracts of hydroponic grain, huge vats of nutrient slurry, millions of cloned cows that moo in unison, and acellular sheep composed entirely of wool fibers. Science, however, has not completely conquered the farm. One lone, proud animal remains.

The chicken.

Too fickle to conform to breeding programs, and too specialized to succumb to robotic replacement, the world's chickens still produce natural eggs, such that the omelette has become a symbol of The Way Things Used to Be. The world's chickens all reside in a massive complex of pens in central Nebraska, fully automated.

Unfortunately, a recent massive accident resulting from a programming bug has released untold millions of chickens from their pens. They peck and cluck at random, depositing their eggs in a scattered manner, rendering useless the automatic and immobile collecting machines.

It is up to you to produce the world's first generation of Cybernetic Chickens, capable of autonomously recognizing, handling, and depositing these eggs in the collecting machines before they go bad. You must realize that if these eggs go bad, they could unleash a cloud of noxious vapors worse than any chemical weapon.

Time is of the essence. Godspeed!

Strategy

Since the beginning of the contest, we wanted to have a robot that sorts balls. We thought (well, David thought) that it would be cool to have a catapult that launched balls, but with the design of the table, it was impractical. Our next thought was to have a robot with drones that could cover the two holes and color sort the balls, throwing our opponent's balls off the table, while dropping ours into the hole. We threw this idea out; it too was a bit impractical, especially with our limited number of motors. Given the complexity of the table design, we considered having a fast and (relatively) simple bulldozer-type robot, but decided that it was more important to have a cool robot that could do well, than to have a boring one that could win the contest. Our next idea was to have a grabber and sorter, and though we originally thought of storing balls vetically, it proved difficult to implement well. Our final design was a grabber and sorter, with two compartments on either side of the robot that could hold two balls of each color. One additional ball could be held in the front of the robot while holding the ramp up.

We liked this final design since it allowed us to carry many balls at a time, essentially removing them from our opponent's play. Because we could sort, we could drive to our opponent's side of the table and pick up balls that may have been scattered and deal with them accordingly. Plus, it's cool.

Once we had decided upon our design, we started construction. We started with gearboxes that would drive the two back wheels, adding to it a basic frame and a gearbox to operate our gate. We decided to power our back wheels and mount servos on our two front wheels to steer. The next step was to build a sorter, which went through several drafts before we built one that was both strong and compact ... and reliable. We added a gate at the back so that we could release one color of balls at a time (ours into the chutes and our opponent's off the table). =) We built a platform above to hold our Handyboard and batteries and two protruding arms in the front to support our thumper.