Prototype was made by Elizabeth Hass, Keja Rowe and Paresh Malalur, all MIT 2010 freshmen.
Ellie Hass just loves robots. Lego robots, metal robots, if they're around, she's happy. She also spent more time playing with Legos as a child than the other team members. She tried to use her experience in both areas to help build and even program the robot.
Keja Rowe is a natural mechanic and an eagle scout. He is capable of anything building a shelter out of ropes and a tarp on a thirty foot long boat in Boston Harbor to building a two speed transmission out of Lego pieces.
Paresh Malalur is a stellar programmer who recommends that everyone use Linux. It works for him. He thought about the code carefully for the entire competition and was willing to miss whole nights of sleep to get his fantastically complicated ideas to work.
| Name | Prototype |
| Size | Just fits in the 1x1 box with a little bit of coaxing |
| Gear ratio | 125 : 1 |
| Motors | 4 |
| Sensors | Shaft encoders * 2, IR sensors * 4, Bump Sensors * 3, Gyro * damn it |
The team started with a complicated hardware system and kept simplifying it until an hour before we had to turn in the robot. Keja spent three days building a two speed transition that could switch gears with a servo. It was cool, worked admirably well, and was completely impractical. We ditched it for a four wheel drive gear train. That design morphed into a two wheel drive system that could actually turn. Our robot also had a ball gate underneath it with a chute leading to it. If a ball made its way to the back of the chute and hit a touch sensor, a servo would lower two axles and catch the ball. This feature worked amazingly well and caught a ball in one of our three rounds. We also had four infrared light sensors, one at each corner of the robot, which we used to determine the initial starting direction.
We have very little to speak about here. Our bot made it to the finals (thankfully). There, we lost in the first round. But actually, the bot did everything it was supposed to do. Unfortunately, the opponents bot knocked out our balls from the "cage" unintentionally.
We lost our first round due to a silly mistake; we did not place the robot far enough from the wall to complete a 90 degree turn. As a result, it didn't manage to properly orient itself to go straight even though it tried to back up and align with the wall. We had a double win in our second round. Our third round was a close call. We actually scored two out of four balls and caught a third in our ball gate. We missed the middle goal by about a foot, so did not score in that one, and the other team lucked out and managed to knock our two balls out of the goal and put in one of their own. But the robot did score in two out of the three rounds, so we were fairly happy even with our quick elimination.
At least we made it to the finals.
We would like to thank all the orgranizers and TAs for clarifying all the questions we had. We would also like to thank William Throwe for all the help he gave us throughout January 2007. (He he - we screwed up his sleep schedule: Vampires Score!!!)