On March 20th we were finally able to meet up in person, COVID-free!
Today was idea day.
Obviously we wanted to ensure that we had a solid base robot that could easily be expanded and edited to suit the needs of each challenge. We played with the slim design that Kevin made. We liked that it was small, but it wasn't very strong and we didn't think it would tow trailers that well. So we told Kevin to go buy some cookies from Subway and while he was gone we decided to go back to the old Stev3 design with the big wheels.
Then we got to work on the challenges.
For the Nature's Bounty challenge we decided that we would attach our apples to the tree using magnets rather than trying to unhook a loop. Then we could use something to knock them into a net under the tree and carry them home. Easy.
We also came up with ideas for the Hungry Cattle challenge. The idea was to use a funnel that's blocked with an engine controlled nozzle, which seemed like it could work pretty well. We were a little worried about the weight of the rice - it needed to carry around about a kilogram of rice to do the job, so we needed a strong robot and a well balanced trailer to drag it around.
Finally we brainstormed about Shepherd's Pi which said that our robot had to push 6 large sheep into a small barn. Kevin kept talking about a sheep stacker that would collect all 6 at once, but we all thought he was nuts and we sent him for more cookies. When he came back we said we had a solution, but we actually spent the whole time watching Rube Goldberg videos on Youtube.
This is what quality brainstorming looks like:
Comments