Yesterday we had our first official trial for the Golf Ball Challenge. If you are wondering what that is, see my post here to learn more about the challenge.
Yesterday we were able to get the robot to complete the challenge, first in 9.75 seconds, and then 7.68 seconds. We were able to increase the power of the motors to 100% from 75% to get the 2 second improvement. Here is a video of the 7-second run:
As you can see, it could still use improvement. We have not made any modifications from our original design apart from adding some claws to the front. The timer doesn't stop until the golf ball lands in the container, so that pause at the end cost us some time. We got 2nd place for the first trial, the winners got 6.60 seconds. Their robot is quite similar to ours, so I believe with a little modification to ours, we can beat their time. We are planning on lowering the NXT brick so the robot can fit under the ramp closer to the pickup & dropoff to save some time. We will also change the code to get rid of the pause at the end.