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Real food foraging sounds fun – as long as you took your lunch with you and did not have to depend on eating only what you found, because finding food in the forest can be difficult, and you can often go hungry at the end of the day. So as not to be hungry, let us try food foraging using Robots.
The Forest
We will imagine the forest is like the arena to the left. The blue central area will be the forest containing berry bushes (a blue forest? – you need a good imagination for this challenge!) The white area surrounding the forest will be a stream containing fish. The black area around the arena will be a cliff—go beyond that and your imitation Robot Neanderthal will fall to his or her death!
The Food
The green cups in the middle of the blue forest will be pretend berry bushes that our Robot forager will have to gather and take back to the home square where it started from.
We can imagine the fish in the stream to be the transparent cups in the white stream between the blue forest and the black cliff edge. Just as in real life fishing is more difficult than gathering berries, so gathering the transparent cups representing fish and bringing them back home may be more difficult than collecting berries.
In real life, gathering honey from a bee hive high in a tree or high up a cliff edge is dangerous and difficult. So, just as in real life, gathering the red cup representing honey may be the most difficult of all. Can you collect the red cup that is right on the cliff edge and bring it back home, without falling over the cliff edge and dying? You are going to try? Good luck! There will be much rejoicing in your tribe if you can bring all that sweet honey back home…
Placing the Food
The green berry bushes go in the blue forest. The transparent fish go in the white stream. The red honey hive goes on the black cliff edge.
Scoring
Your Robot will aim to gather as much food as possible in 2 minutes, without falling over the edge of the cliff and dying.
Since the berry bushes are the easiest to collect, we could score 1 point for each berry bush your Robot finds and touches, changing to 2 points if your forager brings it back to the dark blue home square for the tribe to eat. Fish are harder, so perhaps we could score 2 points for each fish found and touched, which could change to 4 points if your Robot can bring the fish to the home square. Honey is very difficult, so perhaps 4 points could be given if your Robot manages to touch the honey, changing to 8 points if your Robot manages the remarkable feat of bringing the honey back to your home square for your tribe to enjoy.
The minimum expectation to pass this challenge is that your robot leaves the blue square, forages until it finds food, then returns to the square. Without that, you do not pass. The par score for a B is that you earn at least 15 points by contacting each bit of food, bringing at least 1 back to the starting point in under 2 minutes. 23 point will earn you an A. The maximum score is 30.
Additional details
Room lights will be ON for the duration of the challenge, so either build a hood or prepare to analyze the various ground types and program accordingly.
A flow chart and Engineering Logs for each class meeting day are required to get ANY grade for this challenge.
*Revisions to the challenge as decided by the class 3/26/13
No limits to the size of the bot
When returning to the tribe, food will be removed. Bot can then be re-oriented to its original direction, and the program re-started.
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