So, I’m doing this here 6.270 — Autonomous Robot Design Competition as my thing this IAP. To sum it up in a brief little chunk, basically, a lot of people make some robots out of Lego and control them using these Handyboard things, which are just fancy little control boards that let you make simple robots. All of the robots (60 teams worth) will then be pitted against each other in a set of qualifying rounds and then a big double elimination competition.
Now, that the cursory explanation for those out of the loop is done, some other details. My team consists of myself and that Muth kid. Muth’s a good kid; I like him and I think that we’ll manage to do pretty damned well with this competition thing. We’ve already figured out our strategy for trying to win and it seems pretty solid and more importantly, simple. Since we’ve got a good hold on what we’re going to be doing and how we’re going to do it, we’ve taken up being a bit arrogant, but I think that it’s not totally unfounded. Following are some of the amusing things that exemplify this arrogance:
- Planning to be done 1 – 2 weeks before the competition
- Planning to sit around getting wasted while everyone is frantically trying to make theirs work when the deadline is upon them
- Fielding a placebo robot for qualifiers
- Naming our robot “# Awesome”, where # is the number of points that we will be earning in every round.
- Not using the extra batteries
- Not using the expansion board
Anyway, the list continues, but the basic point is that we think that we’ve got this competition in the bag and we’re going to be jackasses about it. It will be pretty damned fun to be better than the rest of MIT and lord it over them. Admittedly, if we fuck up, then we’re just a pair of idiot jerks, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.