Ladies, gentlemen and cyborgs, we were inspired today by Sir Bezos to automate the Nature’s Bounty challenge in order to eradicate human error and raise our profit margin.
In the Nature’s Bounty challenge:
Remote Control apples are worth 30 points each
Autonomous apples are worth 50 points each
We had already got a decent remote control run with 10 apples per round on average, so we knew we only needed to get 6 consistently to break even. Although consistency turned out to be the main problem, as the trailer was dragging and pulling the robot off course (even with gyro correction).
This problem was a tricky one: “how do I re-align STEV3?”.
I remembered back to season-2 episode-19 of Avatar the Last Airbender where the guru tells Ang he needs to re-align his chakras. This really struck a chord with me and got me thinking whether or not robots have chakras and souls (btw google assures me that yes, yes they do).
Inspired by “the guru” and armed with this knowledge I attempted to re-align STEV3’s chakras by having him drive into the edge of the area to make sure he has his bearings again (I’ve heard that sometimes pushing humans into walls get also helps them regain their senses).
The only down cider with this approach is that sometimes STEV3’s chakras would get stuck in the core-ner during his turn to head to the next side of the tree. Luckily this was a quick fix and just required a small ‘retract’ from the wall to accommodate a full 90 degree turn.
The fine tuning of the exact commands that STEV3 would run was done very simply by having a subroutine for the entire mission and then just manually writing in calls to a bushel of other subroutines within the sauce code in that for driving, turning, and raising/lowering the apple picker. This worked quite well, and we were then able to simply choose the challenge from the prompt in the python output meaning we could just work from one file for all the challenges.
STEV3’s chakras were now aligned, cleared AND we had bagged an extra 350 points (total of 1250).
I would like to dedicate this blog to Mr. Guru Man and my good buddy Jeffery (Bezos) who helped inspire us to automate this challenge. If you’re sick of apple puns I’d like you all to know that I’m not sorry and I wont apple-ogize because it peels really good to have automated this mission.
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