The Robot Competition went far better than I had expected. I fell sick on Friday and had to miss the Lab and on Monday and Tuesday, I totally forgot that we had open lab times to get our robot to do something. The claw to get hold of the golf balls was to be tweaked and optimized for getting maximum balls in without losing them when it moves backwards and the complete programming was to be done.
My partner did a great job with programming and tweaking the claw and came up with a great idea to get hold of those golf balls. She made up for my delay and we did really work as much as possible on Wednesday during the open lab timings. Adding a few rubber bands helped to contain the ball while the LEGO NXT Mindstorm Robots took a turn and followed the black lines.
The competition was on Thursday and we were to compete with 3 other teams. We did fairly well by getting 3 balls out of 5 in our first two attempts. In the last attempt, however, we could only get in a single golf ball. Still, we made it back to our spot every single time and earned the 2 bonus points every time. The lowest scores were to be dropped and we had an average score of more than 8, which was really good. The scores were the sum of total no. of the balls put in by both the teams and the bonus points if the robot, or part of it, gets back to the starting point. We scored a total of 20 points and the lowest was 3. So that basically is 8.5 as an average score.
EGR 101 is turning out to be a fun filled class. We are going to have a Lighter than Air Vehicle competition really soon and it sure sounds amazing to be a part of. However, I have heard that this time the teams are going to be selected by the Professors themselves