30 minutes into the competition, after about 20 hours of non-stop building, we finally completed our mobot. The mobot, patched together by band-aids, gave us problems until the the very end, until everything just came together and worked. From the back of the mobot, you can see the h-bridge, microcontroller, and power board. In the very front under the cardboard is the sensor board.
We were able to make our last heat, but unfortunately we were not able to place. Other than our lack of time we had issues such as an under-spec motor and incomplete sensor board, which essentially decreased the mobot's performance. The motor was run at almost double its rated voltage and as a result we saw constantly degrading speed and torque. The sensor unit used was actually the sensor module built for testing and not for the competition. We simply didn't have enough time to create a new one.
Overall, this season of mobot was pretty good considering the quality and sophistication of hardware produced. Being students at Carnegie Mellon, we are fed so much information and work at a sporadic rate that the difficulty of managing time is understandable. However, this will be our main challenge going into mobot 2012.
