I got ridiculously sunburned today watching the robots race. It was the ultimate Carnegie Mellon stereotype--tiny robots racing down the sidewalk while a Computer Science professor dressed in a kilt and brandishing a sword revved the crowd up to cheer the robots on. The robots have to be able to recognize a white line curving down the sidewalk to get through fourteen gates. Only one robot got through all the gates, but it took too long to be counted (over four minutes.) Two robots couldn't even get moving, and their creators were working frantically over to the side, laptops covered in coats to be visible in the unexpected sunlight. One robot failed to find the line and kept racing in circles and once straight into the registration booth.
The robot that won was called Plan B (Plan A had failed two weeks earlier) and featured a finger-like "gate sensor" and a sensor shade made of cardboard and egg carton packing foam.
Now I feel like I'm really a Carnegie Mellon student :) I wonder if any of the mobot teams need an English student to write documentation for them?
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