Team Strategy

Summary 

We recognised the problem to be a travelling salesman problem, because there are a massive number of possible drop-off and pick-up points for each debris and different possible permutations of the debris. Thus, we could create a series of nested for loops that check every possible permutation and drop-off and pick-up points to a six-decimal point precision (the max precision the ZeroRobotics IDE will allow) that would result in a massive number of iterations that could be unrealistic to calculate. 

Initially, we created functions that find the most optimal drop off and pick up point between two debris. However, because these two functions find the most optimal drop off and pickup points only considering two debris, it may not minimise the overall cost. Thus, in order to find points that are more cost efficient and realistic to calculate, we used the functions to find drop-off and pick-up points for each debris and manually adjusted the points so that, 1. they were moved in the direction of the next object, 2. increased the overall battery score and time score range. For pick up points, we used Desmos Graphing Calculator to graph circles with the centres of the debris and radius of the maximum distance one can pick an object at from to locate possible pick-up points to test. 

We avoided the gap between objects 0, 3 by using permutations that did not involve travelling between the 0-3 gap, e.g. for positions 3, we retrieved object 3 first, then moved in a counterclockwise direction from object 2 to object 0, because more debris are located along the other edges. 

Written by Charlotte