Results

      My mama lost her qualifying round because she didn't start when the round began. We wrote our own startup code literally 3 minutes before we were up, because the code given to us by the staff caused our servos to spasm sporatically to the point where my mama couldn't even steer. The TA's finally found a fix for this problem so we implemented it and qualified, but by Round 2 we had run out of time to write code to make my mama score for all possible obstacle scenarios.

      6.270 was lots of fun until we started working 20 hours a day. And even then we still felt like there was more work to do than was possible. It turns out that we (and just about every other team) just didn't have any idea how to prioritize in order to meet the contest day deadline. We had a million little things we were working on, like mounting sensors we didn't even have code for yet, and planning for exotic scenarios before we could even get one ball in. It wasn't until the first round that we actually realized how much work we had done on such unimportant things.

      The reason my mama was so grossly underprepared at crunch time was two-fold. For one, this year's contest was the hardest ever. Because there were two obstacles on the table that had sixteen possible combinatorial locations, it was extremely hard for any robot to not get stuck somewhere. There were so many possible ways for the robots to become fatally disoriented that most got stuck within the first 10 seconds of the round. The second factor was the failure, on the part of TA's, to convey from the get-go that in order to have a fully functioning robot by the first round, a team has to prioritize like crazy. (The staff was unbelievably helpful in all other areas, particularly in lab.) All features not absolutely pertinent to your robot's ability to get balls in should not be attended to until your robot has basic functionality.

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