This project was an assignment for Cornerstone of Engineering. It was completed by Julian Lechner, Reed Kellett, Stephen Zhou, and myself. This assignment proved to be much more challenging than face value. The assignment was broken into two parts. The first part was everyone had essentially the same robot structure but varied solely in coding. We strategized and tested extensively. However, when it came to competition the robot would not stay within the bounds of the ring. We believe this was due to error of calibration in the sensors. While this loss was upsetting and avoidable, we learned to calibrate better next competition. As for the second competition we decided to utilize the knowledge we had from our service learning site where we go to an elementary school and do the exact same project with them, and incorporate the best designs into our robot. After the service learning sites we learned that kids are some of the best brainstormers. We implemented what we learned from the kids into our design with a very simplistic touch. We had realized that a lot of complicated robots (whether in code or structure) have more possibilities to really mess up. Therefore, we placed a fairly simple wooden ramp on the front of the robot, with white LEDs underneath to allow for ample light for the front sensors. We also successfully added a protective white barrier around our robot so that when other robots attempted to attack us they would turn away. This design feature proved useful on more than a few occasions.
After all the smoke and dust settled, our robot, The Busa, came out on top.