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.

Monday 4/25/2011

Today, in class we had the throwing and hunting ball contest. Every other team except one other team and our team used blue tooth to find the ball. The other team that didn't use blue tooth ended up finding the ball, but our team had trouble finding the ball. One of the successes that we had though was throwing our ball the farthest. This was fun even though we were not able to find the ball. Probably if we had more time we could of mastered the programming of throwing and finding the ball inside the program. The lego projects was a fun experience and we learned a lot from it. Especially with the programming.

Wednesday 4/20/2011

Today in class we worked on the Lego ball finding robot. For throwing the ball, we are using something like a baseball pitcher with a wheel spinning really fast that shoots the ball and a piece that pushes the ball into the wheel. We were having trouble because it kept falling apart, or it was at too little or too much of an angle, or the ball would get stuck. We solved that by mounting the wheels directly to the shooter. We also were working on the robot design and where the wheels should go during the later part of class. A problem we were having with that was that the there was almost nowhere to attach the NXT to. To solve that we attached the NXT directly in between the wheels with the sonar sensor in the front.

During mentor session we worked on the ball shooter and the robot some more. We also worked on the program for finding the ball. We are actually putting the work into it and using the sonar sensor and programming method to detect and find the ball, rather than going the cheap easy route via Bluetooth like most of the other groups are. The hardest part about this is getting the program to work and getting the sonar sensor to detect the ball.

Week 4 Monday 4/18/2011

Today was the test for our robot to follow a line with gaps. We designed our robot to turn slightly left when a button was pushed to be able to jump the gaps. At first we were having some trouble with the threshold value for the light sensor as it changes everytime were in a new room. Once we got that worked out it worked perfectly.

We played around a bit trying to see how fast we could go without failure. Then it came to test time; We did pretty good got 2nd fastest timing!

Then we started work on the catapult. We played around with making a really long arm, then applying a gear ratio to it to try and get it to swing faster.

Wednesday 4/13/2011

Attempt at making the program work.

Today we worked on the robot trying to get it to follow the line and get across the gaps. We we're having problems with the robot not detecting the line and not getting back on the line after the gap.

Week 3: Monday, April 11, 2011

  

Today was the test for our robot to follow a line for 2 laps and stop on the red square. We were not able to get the sensor to effectively discern between red and black so we abandoned any hope of getting it to stop by that method.

Initially the line was very narrow and we were only able to get out robot to work by slowing it way down. Christof, the professor, then decided to thicken the line and we started testing how fast we can set our robot without losing the path. Our optimization of speed proved to be a success and our robot performed the 2 laps in the shortest amount of time.

As for stopping, Steven decided that since we couldnt get detection of red to work he would program it to stop after a certain amount of time. He spent much back and forth work, as we adjusted the speed as well, but eventually got it stop very close after 2 laps. Unfortunately, it was not close enough to count as stopping at the red square so we lost those points.

                                                    My test track at home.

Week 2 Wednesday Post

Today, the team was ready for competition for the tug-of-war. We came in to the competition with a new design. We still had a winch, but it was more centered and had gears. During competition we started out with a competitor that had a lot more weight then ours and had a different design. Our tug-of-war car ended up bouncing all over until we lost and went across the line. In the losers bracket we also went against a competitor with a much heavier weight and different design, but this time we lost even faster. In mentor session we redeemed ourselves with some better competition and came out strong.