TekBots Obstacle Course

I originally meant to post this yesterday, but I was too busy. Anyway, In my Fundamentals of Circuits lab we had a few different challenges set up for our robot cars. The challenges included an obstacle course, a race, a TekBots quiz, judging for 'style points' and judging for workmanship (quality of completed work). The prizes for each of these challenges were pints of Ben & Jerry's ice cream. I conveniently forgot to plug my robot car in the night before (I had every intention to do so... funny how that works), but I also managed to optimize the tuning on my robot car for obstacle courses and races.

I ended up winning two of the challenges. With the obstacle course, each person had to get there robot car from the starting point to the finish line (the invisible line that travels through the trash can and the cardboard box...). I had my car tuned so that if it hit the left sensor it would make a quick (and i mean quick) right turn before taking off again. This worked out great because my car was setup so that it could easily go around obstacles. I ended up winning the obstacle course even though my car was the slowest, simply for its fine tuning.

Even with how slow my car was traveling I almost won the race. We had it setup as a straight track with all the boards and boxes from the obstacle course. There were four robot cars total, and mine was, by far, the slowest. When the race started the car on the far left (I was on the far right) hit one of longer boards on the side of the course. This board then spun backwards and hit the other two cars. I found this to be rather funny considering the fact the my car was the slowest, but it was also the only one that wasn't affected by this 'course malfunction.' My car kept on going straight, but then the other three cars got themselves out of the messy situation that they were in, and a car finally crossed the finish line. My car almost made it, but someone had road rage and slammed into one of my wheels. This turned my car around so that it was facing some boards in the direction of the starting line, and sure enough my robot car starting working its way around the boards. Needless to say that I didn't win this event, but it was still a lot of fun.

The second event that I won was the TekBots quiz. There was a single problem on the quiz, and the first person to answer the problem won the challenge. This quiz wasn't graded, but it did mean that the winner got a pint of Ben & Jerry's ice cream. I don't know how close the other students were to finding the answer to the question, but I know that I answered it very quickly. I would explain what the question was about if explaining it would result in this post being 4 pages long.

I ended up winning two events. This meant that I got two pints of Ben & Jerry's ice cream. It was definitely a good idea to fine tune my robot car the night before. I don't know why I didn't manage to plug my robot car in for the night after I finished fine tuning it. In the race I came really close to the finish line before my wheel got hit. I am confident that I would have won the race if I would have remembered to plug in my robot car. I am definitely not at any loss though. The challenges were a lot of fun, building the bot was a lot of fun, and winning two events was a lot of fun. Now I can get fat off of two pints of ice cream... :-)