Blog

Zazu just can't wait to be king

Posted by Anna on January 15, 2010

So within the last week, we've come up with too many robot designs to count, CAD drawings of much of said designs, a prototype of the kicker, overall game strategy outlined, updates from LabVIEW and Windriver downloaded on as many computers as we can scrounge up, and we've still got the busiest part of build season ahead of us. Whew.

We haven't officially finalized any designs for Zazu (that's this year's name for our bot), but probably within the next week or two we'll know for sure what our robot will almost exactly look like. Since we've had quite a few years practice we've gotten pretty efficient at robot building, so we can spend more time creating a good design for the game. As of now our current robot design and game strategy is this. However, chances are we won't end up going with that.

I don't think anyone has injured themself too badly yet (this is new). I'm rather surprised no one has been hit upside the head with a soccer ball yet though.

As usual Chief Delphi is swarming with posts from teams across the world with questions and answers and comments and jokes and whatnot. I never really used Chief Delphi much until this year, mostly because the way the posts were organized kind of confused me. But it's actually insanely helpful, since there are really experienced teams out there answering lots of questions that are definitely beneficial to everyone, and there's always people posting updates so it's easier to keep track of what we need to catch up on. So I'll definitely be relying on that website a lot more this season.

This is going to be confusing at the Championships when all the non-US people refer to the soccer balls at footballs...

Anna