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Daniela Rus --- Keith Kotay
Each group will be building a rat robot. Your rat will be a hungry rat. The robot rats will scavenge for food. The food will consist of blocks of Lego that will be scattered throughout the robot's environment. The robo rats will have some knowledge of good places to look for food. In addition to these known places, the robots will have to use their senses to look for new opportunities in the form of special blocks of food that can be detected. These blocks of food will emit a visible light signal which your robots will be able to detect. Some of the food blocks in known locations will be ``poisonous''. They will have magnets embedded in their surfaces which can be detected by Hall Effect sensors. Taking poisonous foods back to the home location will decrease your score.
The rat robots will be built out of lego and will be entirely controlled by an on-board computer.
On the last day of classes, each group robot will be given 10 minutes to scavenge for food. A map with the location of the blocks in known locations will be available. We will set up a maze-like rat environment with walls. The rat will start in a special position called ``home''. The rat will have to identify as many food items as possible and bring them home.
The objective of the contest is to accumulate as many points as posisble. You get points by (1) locating the food items and (2) bringing the food items home (unless they are poisonous, in which case you get negative points).
After the start of the round, no modifications are allowed to your programs. No parts or substances may be deliberately dumped, deposited, or otherwise left on the board game.
There are 6 kits that contain exaclty the same LEGO components and motors. The kits also contain the Handyboard, and an expansion of this board (a daughter board) that will allow you to add more sensors if you wish. You may request extra sensors by presenting a list of parts and a budget. The budget should be around $35.
Only LEGO parts and connectors may be used as the robot structure. Rubber bands are counted as lego so they can be used to provide support for your machine. LEGO pieces may not be glued together. LEGO pieces may not be modified except to facilitate the mounting of a sensor or actuator. LEGO pieces may also be modified to perform a function directly related to the function of a sensor (for example, if you wanted to implement an optical shaft encoder you may drill holes into a LEGO wheel.
You may use cardboard to create a tube to mount sensors or to create shields for light sensors.
Wire may only be used for electrical, not structural purposes.
The dimesions of the robot smay not exceed 1 foot x 1 foot x 1 foot.
Any machine that appears a safety hazard will be disqualified from the competition.
The robots will be programmed in Interactive C. Robert Fitch is currently installing Interactive C on the machines in the linus lab and in the Mac lab. Please get acess to these labs. You may not use the machines in the robot lab for programmming. You may not take your robots home. You may take your robots to the labs downstairs to test your programs but the robots have to be kept in 201 at all other times.
To encourage creativity, teams may spend up to $15 of their own funds to purchase additional components used in their designs. You must document these components with receipts. No single part may cost more that $5. You may use resistors rated less that 1 watt and capacitors valued less than 100 F freely, without accounting towards the $15 total.
Each group is required to come to a 30 minute meeting each week. Each group is required to keep a journal with weekly entries. A project report is required at the end of the course. The report should document clearly all your design and coding decisions. Each group member should include a short essay (a couple of pages) entitled ``Building Brains and Bodies''.