6.270 Robotics Competition
Team 24
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Our Strategy

Our general strategy was to collect as many balls of either color as possible, sort them by color, and keep them stored in the robot until near the end of the match. Then, depending on which color ball we had more of, we would either dump the currently winning color balls in on of our scoring areas or dump the currently losing color balls in one of our opponent's scoring areas. If time was left, we would dump the remaining balls in either our scoring area or our opponent's, depending on what we had done previously. Throughout all of the match we would ignore voting and focus on collecting and then depositing balls.

To make this happen, we decided to build a rotating "flapper" that would scoop balls like a water wheel up a ramp and into our robot as the robot moved over top of them. Once in the robot, the balls would be funneled toward a small cup shaped platform. Any balls that were picked up by the flapper would roll one at a time to the end of the platform, where a light sensor would read the ball to determine whether it was red or green. Then, depending on the ball's color, the platform would be rotated either left or right, and the ball would fall through an opening in the platform's side into a bin in the robot below. A wall would separate the two bins so that red and green balls wouldn't be able to mix, and two gates would be added to the back of the robot to allow the balls to leave the robot when necessary.