The Kicking and Moving Robot

This is a picture of our robot from the front!

Today, we finished building our robot. The goal of our robot for this next challenge is to have it move a ball and then chase after the ball and touch it. We tried out many different designs to make our robot the most effective. We made an arm that will spin and kick the ball. We decided that if it rolls, it won’t bounce and has a better chance of going straight. Also we created a funnel like tunnel that when we approach the ball, it should get captured and then follow the rails until it is back at the kicker arm. The reason why we need it to return to the kicker arm is because it is extra credit if it can reload and push the ball again.

The program for our robot is simple and it is actually non-existent. We do not need to program any program for this challenge. This is because we are able to control all of the motors on the robot individually with the Bluetooth device. We are using Chris’s phone’s Bluetooth to control all of the motors. Today, we spent mentor session practicing controlling the robot with the remote. The controller is tilt censored which sometimes makes it hard to control, but we worked it out and we believe that we are going to be able to hopefully dominate on Monday when we test out the robot.

We discovered today that using the title flooring in the hallway was very hard to work with because not only did the ball go farther, but it traveled faster than the robot did. This took us much longer than it should have and caused us to not be able to find the ball easily. We decided that we want to do the challenge on carpet. To us, this will allow us to be faster than the ball and therefore catch it faster.