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Last Tuesday I was at a robotics meeting/competition. We did the average “table-top” game: keep your bot on the table the longest. If you hit an object, you loose points, and you gain points my going over a black line.

Basically, in order to gain the most points, you want to have a perfect collision detection system, and a good idea of how to get across the lines. One such bot that (nearly) did all of these was that of Brian Patton. He had great ideas, but was unable to get his line-detection working in time. Here’s his bot:

You can see the light sensors on the back to sense the line.

I took the approach of, “hey I don’t have a lot of time, lets just throw together a bot that can get around.” I remembered thatlast time we did this game, I had trouble with objects up close: the side-sweep if the IR sensors is very small. Thus, I added whiskers to aid in detection of objects. They worked great. And, if my code was a little better, I might have won. (I got second of three.) Here’s my bot (and me):

You can see the whiskers well in these pictures:

And here’s my bot in action:

Also from my school were Mike, Ian, and Waz (Brian). They learned just that night how to read an IR sensor and control using that information. I think they did an amazing job for that, and should be idealized. We didn’t get a shot of their bot, but here they are trying to figure it all out:

Let me know if you want info on any of this!