Design

      Three days before impounding, we decided to completely redesign and rebuild my mama. We wanted to add more motors, make the geartrain faster and more efficient, make the body stronger... well heck, while we were at it, why not change our whole strategy? My mama was originally designed to collect balls by sucking them into a reservoir, and eventually spitting them out into the trough to score. However, the earliest version of my mama turned out to have poor speed and modest maneuverability. Furthermore, we thought she would be susceptible to certain other types of robots.

      The new design worked out beautifully. My mama as she is now maximizes power, speed, and strength. We took advantage of the fact that my mama's kinetic energy relied much more on speed than weight. Powered by a total of six motors and built on a chasis re-enforced in every direction, my mama was one formidable cybernetic chick'in. In test-runs across the contest table, my mama hit on the wooden wall so hard that a piece of something flew into the air. To our surprise, no pieces of LEGO had broken off; instead, a bit of wood that had been chipped off the table. That's right, my mama could beat up yours!

      We chose to use precisely centered drive wheels; as a result, my mama can turn in place and maneuver with total efficiency. Two layers of nearly solid brick makes up the front of my mama; to put it mildly, my mama can take quite a clash and still emerge unfazed. Two distance sensors were embedded in my mama's front side, ostensibly to detect the location of the obstacle in the starting area. A single servo-controlled wheel centered in the rear of the robot balances the load and aids in steering. To facilitate making tight turns while holding balls, we gave my mama a large arm to trap balls with, plus two prongs outside the arm to guide extra balls into the trough. We also mounted my mama's IR beacon on a servo for use as a high resolution "radar" to find our opponents so that my mama could subsequently ram 'em (sadly we had insufficient time to actually implement this radar). Finally, we mounted a few keystroke bump sensors for good measure. That about does it for my mama's design specs.

© 2002 My Mama also © 2002 Ryan Damico and Pei-Hsin Lin