I'm not an engineer, but its funny, there are some engineering concepts that translate to the real world. Apply a lot of force to something and it moves. Less force, maybe not.
Over the weekend we brought two robots to an off season competition. One was "Mustard" the robot built by the high school team over a couple of months of work. Complex. Had a rough outing at its first event but was heroic in the second tournament. At its third event - the unofficial state tourney - it flagged a bit. And it was mostly just sitting around since then. A couple of the high school team members who had never driven it took a couple hours to see if they could learn it.
The other robot was Ketchup. Built by middle schoolers over the course of 6 sessions. Rugged, single minded, it was designed to do one thing. Pick up those white pipes and drop them into the lowest tier of the scoring platform. They worked hard on this project.
So....how did it turn out?
Mustard, the high school robot struggled. It was
designed to do one thing, score those pipes on the highest
scoring point. Alas, just as one dog year equals seven
human years, so also with robots. One month is about
seven human years, making Ketchup an old timer.
Old timers have aches and pains, things that go amiss
We had wiring issues deep inside the mechanisms, and
several matches the darn thing just sat there. Worst
record of all robots there in the qualifying rounds. True,
it got a bit happier towards the end. Pit crew and the
new drivers learned a lot. It got picked for an
elimination round alliance based on how it ran its last few matches.
As for Ketchup, the middle school built machine...it was designed to do one thing and to do it very well. Pick up those pipes and get them to the lowest scoring level reliably and fast. 10 per match please. It's lining up for the shot in this picture, with its temporary number 9996.
And it did just that. True, it only managed a bit more than 7 per match but to be fair it was called upon to play defense a few times or it would have come close. The event kept detailed stats, and Ketchup finished ahead of several regular season robots in the won lost column (including its big brother Mustard) and number one in those L1 scores. Design objectives achieved.
Ironically the two robot sibs were both on the same alliance in playoffs and did very well together. They did not quite make it to the final round, but came close.
The matches will be available on Youtube in a few days. I'll post some links then. We may also put together a "Making of Ketchup" video down the road a bit. In the meantime here's a bit of entertainment from the displays out in the lobby area. Robot Dog. Hank would go nuts seeing this...