Team Reflection

Overall, our teamed kicked ass. We were very aggressive about approaching the competitions and it shows in the number of challenges we finished first or second. However we did have our share of shortcomings on some projects.

In the beginning we rocked, for the very first project we had our prototype out within 3 minutes and began working on second models immediately. Initially we had some bugs to work out with the rubber band getting caught causing our car to barely move the first trial and go backwards the second trial. But, we got it worked out in the 3^rd trial and car blazed to 2^nd place!

We kept the same pacing going into the second project: the tug-of-war contest. We went with a car with a winch attached to pull the opposing vehicle in. We soon realized this was a major design mistake as we saw several other groups abandon the car model completely and realized it was better just to sit still on a massive platform and pull the opposition in with a winch. This was further exaggerated when several groups added extra weight to their vehicles using non-lego parts and as such our car didnt stand a chance against these behemoths.

Despite the previous failure our group kept on trucking. Once we got the simple programming down for the line challenge and a few tests to see how fast our guy could go, we got the fastest timing on the line following challenge!

The next project was extremely tricky. It sounds simple to just follow the same line but with gaps but it becomes a major programming problem to build some sort of pathfinding for your robot. We originally tried to to program the robot, but even trying to build some simple commands, loops, and if statements with variables is extremely complex in the lego programming language.

The group went thru a lot of arguing about what we can do to make this program work and frustrations were felt among everyone in the group. Despite this obstacle peace was held and group continued to cooperate. We could never really get the pathfinding program to work and when we heard you could just use a button to assist your robot across gaps we went with that.

In the final catapult challenged we completely failed. We had a lot of redesigns over the ball throwing mechanism and as such the vehicle itself. At one point it was so bloated and heavy it couldnt turn itself properly. We had a good distance throw but the ultrasonic detection never worked well and we failed to find the ball in the test. We felt somewhat jipped over this one since most other groups bypasses this challenge all together by connecting their smart phones via bluetooth to the robot and thus controlling it remotely.

Overall, our team was solid. We all had good attendance and contributed equally to the blog. No one had any major issues with their role in the group. We excelled at some challenges. We failed at some challenges, but it was never due to some group dispute or problem, just other technical problems.