Inspiration

For our 12th meeting (which was a couple weeks ago), I figured we needed something to shake things up a bit. We have been using the generic robot design, with just slight changes to the arm out front, so I looked up several videos showing teams who have created a variety of different types of robots to solve as many parts of the Hydrodynamics Challenge as possible.


We watched three different ones, with all very different approaches and takeaways. Above is one of the three videos we watched. The main takeaway is that they were very creative in how they built the base robot and the various appendages to perform all the tasks. They also aimed to solve several tasks back to back, so an arm might move one way to drop something in a certain place and then it moves back the other way to slide a piece somewhere else. They even left pieces out on the field if they were no longer needed.

They have been mostly trying to program the robot to move around and do things with the simple arm, but this opened them up to the idea of building more, which they were excited about. One thing we do need to come back around to is the idea that they need to build the machines as simply as possible and in a way that they won't break easily. A few of the team were trying to activate a lever and used a bunch of complicated gears, when just a bump with a large arm would have done the job.

Our helper was missing for this session, but we were largely focused given the inspiration provided by the videos.