6.270 Robotics Competition 2008
The Ray and Maria Statabot
Team Members: Iolanthe Chronis '08, Jonathan Losh '11
What is a Statabot? A Statabot is a two-tiered fusion of technology and awesome. The bottom tier is a modified version of of the car of awesomeness, and the top tier is our custom designed ball dropping mechanism. The two are held together by a series of braces, whose awkward appearance give Statabot its name.
Click for full size
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Top View |
Side View |
Happyboard View |
Back View |
Back View |
Bottom |
Drive Train: Two wheel differential drive with one surprisingly non-sketchy third wheel to provide balance and minimal resistance to turning.
Strategy: We wanted to be the one team that at least tried to score accurately. Our bot was designed to score as close to the target number as possible while dropping at least 1 ball in the 2 point bin, just in case we couldn't get across the board successfully.
Electronics: One bump sensors on the back, a gyro for moving straight and turning, 2 drive motors, 2 motors to operate gates, 4 IR sensors.
Results: 1-2, Eliminated facing the same position on the same board
Our robot was very consistent in testing, but didn't work on the competition board. We think it might have been due to brighter lighting throwing off our IR sensors, despite the fact that our readouts showed the sensors reading correctly before the match.
What we took from 6.270: We had the most fun building the robot. We also learned exactly why wiring should be done well the first time, as our intial wiring was shoddily done with frosh power and ended up shorting an IR LED, leading to a giant round of headaches. We also learned the give-and-take nature of the mechanical and digital sides of our bot: many problems that couldn't be built around were coded around and vice-versa. The most infamous of these was the fact that our ball dropping ramp sometimes caused balls to get stuck, leading to the creation of the "Stata jiggle" adored by so many.