We recently did a Sumo challenge between our class and another. Our robot was designed to push the other robot off the edge of the area to win.
Aaron’s thoughts
We decided to call our robot Stevie Wonder, as he had many troubles with the sensors in the beginning.
We did not have many prototype robots, we mainly just built upon the one design however we did suffer a few hiccups along the way. At the start we found it a bit challenging to keep our robot within the limited size limit (inside a cone) so we had to make many modifications and changes to fix this, this involved redesigning parts of the robot.
When we first tested the robot in a practice sumo challenge it worked surprisingly well. It won that practice match and we were very happy with it. However when we added the colour sensor and made a few changes to the design/programming and it stopped being as effective. It did not seem to have enough power to push the other robots effectively. We believe this is due to a some external design flaws.
When we did the proper sumo challenge our sensors worked properly and effectively however it still did not have enough power. We ended up losing and only winning against one opponent (there robot kept driving off the playing field).
If we did this again then we would try to fix whatever programming and physical problems there were with our robot. We would have to make a few changes so this could be a good and competitive sumo robot.
Matthew’s thoughts
In the first iteration of the robot he did fine he had a good amount of speed and power but wasn’t as defended as the later versions as well as not having a colour sensor which just made him run off the edge he would find the opponent by spinning until it’s ultrasonic sensor spotted the other robot would would get him to charge at them. next we added a colour sensor and fortified him but something was wrong, he couldn’t push anything which was a HUGE problem as that is what he was meant to do but at least he stopped running over the edge. as we went back to the drawing board we decided to remove a lot of his weight and the programmer tried to make it turn and mover all around faster.
The final version of the robot was the worst version as it lacked the defences of version 2 and the ability to actually move the opponent from version 1 but it did turn quicker at the start so it could see people which wasn’t much use as it couldn’t do anything after that making it lose the 2 matches it played in and in the first match it didn’t even win a bout. we believe the reason it couldn’t push the opponents is because it didn’t have good balance between power and speed as the lacked one of them as well as one of the wheels appearing to be faulty. at first it was believed to be him being to heavy but after removing a bunch of the weight from it.
In conclusion our robot started out well but the following version proceeded to get worse which probably not a good thing and in hindsight we shouldn’t have said he was really good in his bio. if we did this again we would probably have to make the robot more similar to the first version compared the final version as the first version actually worked properly.
