Team 52's OUTTA CONTЯOL

Garrett Peavy, Emily Chi, and Jeff Hsu

Picture Slide Show

 

Videos (right click then save target/link as...)

Practice 1 - good (11.2MB)

Practice 2 - better (8.97MB)

Round 1 - just bad (5.62MB)

     
Lego man vs. The world
 

          Outta Control was one of the smallest robots in the 2002 6.270 contest, but that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t up to the Chicken challenge!!  In its first match in the final round, Outta Control went up against Angry Angie, a robot that attacks its poor opponent, and in a match that had the audience shouting “BATTLE BOTS!!”, Outta Control fought to the last second, but sadly lost to Angie 0-3.

          Outta Control is a five-wheeler.  On each of the two sides of the robot are two three-inch wheels.  Each pair of wheels is connected to a gearbox and a motor.  These pairs of wheels drive the robot.  In the front center is another, smaller and thicker wheel, with a servo attached, which had two purposes: turning the robot about its center axis and driving straight.  An arm is attached to the front of the robot which is controlled by a servo.  The arm is mostly used for trapping balls; in addition, occasionally it is used to straighten the robot using the two bump sensors on each corner by driving straight into a wall.  Originally, there was a large wedge at the back of the robot which was used to push balls over the lip of the table into the trough, but after much testing, the wedge was removed because it seemed unnecessary.  As mentioned before, Outta Control was one of the smallest robots in this years contest.

          The strategy Outta Control used is a very popular one: try to get as many of its balls into the trough as possible.  When Outta Control detects the start light, it orients itself by using IR beacon to detect the direction where the opposing robot is located.  Next it uses a distance sensor on the side to detect whether or not the block is in either of the two positions closest to its starting position.  Either way, it goes forward and captures a ball in its arm and proceeds to back a second ball into the trough.  It then turns and deposits the first ball into the trough as well.  Its actions following this depend on the location of the block, which determines the path it takes to find other balls and deposit them into the trough.  It uses shaft encoding and the front wheel to drive straight and turn, and it uses timed intervals to capture the balls. 

          Similar to most other robots, Outta Control was not built and programmed until basically the last week before the contest.  However, during the last week, the creators of Outta Control spent more time in lab than outside of it, averaging 5 hours of sleep outside lab and 19 hours of tooling inside.  Contrary to what some might assume, all this time was definitely not wasted.  Although their sleep schedules were toyed with, the creators of Outta Control gained a lot from those hours in lab… including knowledge of IC, lego mechanics, and fond memories.  The only thing the creators lost was some of their freshman 15.