Robotics

This has been Garrett's project for the last little while.  He joined the school robotics team and built this robot. 

 

He calls is "blunderbuss" and it helped their team win the state competition this year.  

The team entered two robots and they won 1st and 2nd places.

 

This robot is the other robot, it pushed piles of bean bags to the colored square to earn points and also has a claw to pick up and drop bags into the lower trough.

The most points are earned by placing bags in the higher trough, next in the lower trough and least amount of points for bags placed on the starting square.  The robots also get bonus points for ending in the starting square.  Yellow bags score bonus points.

 

So the competitions are all about earning points by placing these bean bags in the right places.  This competition made it even more 'interesting' by weighing the final points.  If a robot drastically out scored their opponent then they were penalized because the teams must not have been evenly matched.  This was frustrating.  Garrett's bot routinely out scored their opponents, but had to hold back to avoid the penalty.   There is a 2 second time frame to show autonomous moves and then 2 minutes to gather beanbags and score with a driver controlling it by remote.  Garrett's robot was unique in this competition because it had an extendable claw that could reach the high trough (had to fit in a 19" cube to start), the robot also had an autonomous (automatic) mode that placed a bag in the trough.  Most bots at this competition didn't have any automatic moves or only moved forward and dropped a bag in the colored square on moving.

Now he's looking forward to competing in the national competition  - if they can raise the money to go.  Our weekends for the foreseeable future involve fundraising :)