"Team Insufficient Mana"

"--because the magic didn't happen."


Although our robot was stumped by the first room, our attempt was not a total loss. Through this course we learned:

- How to interface non-proprietary devices to a highly proprietary platform


- How to construct and program a robot to navigate a maze autonomously


- How to construct and program a robot capable of finding and extinguishing a flame


- How to build an array in RobotC


- Various methods for error-checking and heuristic analysis of environmental variables
     (light intensity for finding a flame, available power, navigation)




In addition, the exercise proved great practice for my fabrication and construction skills.



For the final competition I hard-coded values for the shaft encoders, retrieved by manually pushing the robot through the maze and extracting the values from debugger. However, do to irregularities on the surface of tiles and floating values from the left encoder, the robot was unable to navigate the maze with any large amount of success. The robot did reach the first room on its second attempt and promptly froze--it was later discovered that gremlins in the machine had misplaced a segment of abandoned code in the middle of the "inRoom" function (which detailed the actions of the robot for pinpointing the flame inside a room of the maze once IR Sensor thresholds were met). As a result, the robot found the flame in the room and became stuck in a "while" loop.


In the future, an effort will be made to identify any limiting factors early on, as we assumed that the PIC microcontroller in the VEX brain had sufficient memory for acquiring the strategy we were counting on for victory.