Sumo Robots

Stephanie Campbell Jessalyn Gonzalez Ella Salter

How Fabulous We Are

Jessalyn's best friend is her dog, Max. She enjoys listening to music whenever she can. Ella plays softball and enjoys to listen to music and read in her free time. Stephanie was in FLL robotics for four years with Mrs. Hughes, and her hobbies are reading and photography.

Problem:
Can we get our robot to push the opponent outside of the white ring? Should we go for speed or torque?
Checklist:

Build a robot using LEGO pieces Turn 180 degrees Use torque to push the other robot out of the ring Program the robot Use a light sensor Write a design process

Research:
Learned about gear ratios through notes and NXT activities. We learned and took notes on LEGO dimensions. With this information we were able to create the best robot without the trial and error process. We used the computer to brainstorm robot designs and were able to come up with our own design.

Brainstorming:
After researching, each member of the team came up with a sketch of our ideal robot. After explaining our sketches, we chose the best parts from each design and meshed them, efficiently, together. We used LEGO's Introduction to Mobile Robotics to build our final robot.

Ideas:

Design Brief:
Our final design has three wheels: the smallest front wheel is used for the best ability to turn 180 degrees. We decided to use a ramp in the front of the robot to lift the other robot and knock it off its course.

Final Solution: Aca-Believe It

Evaluate: Our final robot design was very similar to our original idea. We added the light sensor to the front of the robot to stop it from leaving the ring.

Solution:
The final solution was: To have have the robot brain flat on top of the motors.
The motors would drive to large back

wheels that would be used for torque. One small front wheel that would be used to make the 180 degree turn easier, because it could spin 360 degrees.

Solution (continued.)
Our programing for this robot was to spin the robot 180 degrees and then move forward towards the opponents robot. The robots light sensor will detect the white ring and stop before it turns around again.

Reflection
One thing about our team that we noticed was that we all spent too much time focusing on the challenges we had to accomplish before building and programming our robot. A step of the design process our team should have spent more time on was building the prototype/model. It was the most difficult, because that was the step where we had to build the solution we came up with.

Reflection (cont.)
The most difficult part of the challenge was building the actual robot because we did not have much experience building a Lego robot that was to work as well as ours is supposed to be. Prior to this challenge our team could have had more experience working with building a Lego car. It would helped us come up with a more creative design because then we would know what works best and what doesnt.