Round-Up Results

On December 4^th, Crabbot took part in the eleventh annual Lego-robot roundup and was put to the test against the other robots of our classmates. We did some last minute tweaking of his movement to make sure our robot did not overshoot moving into the next square or not travel far enough. We felt pretty confident that Crabbot would be able to navigate the board and reach the gold. Crabbot was able to successfully navigate easy mazes in practice, but it still had some small problems that we were not yet able to figure out. We could only hope that he would not get stuck.

We were the eighth team to go and we watched all seven of the previous robots before us fail in reaching the gold. When it was our turn, Crabbot had trouble moving far enough forward into the square. When it turned around, its sensors were not in the correct spot to get a reading and thus failed to move in the correct direction. We were able to make some quick adjustments and the second time around he now moved forward too much and again, became disoriented. We then picked value in the middle and the third time was the charm. Crabbot got off to a great start, navigating exactly where we thought it would go. However, once it needed to backtrack along its path twice, Crabbot got stuck in an infinite loop between two squares and was unable to realize that he was almost at the gold. Two other teams were able to make it to the gold, but only one made it back to the home square. On the second and slightly harder maze, Crabbot tried again. He, however, also came to the conclusion that he needed to move back two squares, but placed himself into another infinite loop between the squares. I suppose that small problem was never resolved...

We were proud of Crabbot, though, because he never tried to jump of the edge of the board (he only almost glided there because the board was slightly tilted), sacrifice himself to the wumpus, or dive into a pit; he just played it safe and stayed on two squares that he knew did not have a wumpus or pit.