RoboGolf: The 6.270 Autonomous Robot Design Competition of 1998

Welcome to the 11th Annual 6.270 contest.

We are doing the live web broadcast.

Robots begin on either end of the table on these starting areas. From this point on, the robots are on their own. Then they have 60 seconds to operate. There are 18 of these yellow balls laying on the table. These are worth two points to any robot that possesses them. There are balls in each of these robots. The object is to get those balls into the hole.

All right, and they're off. Team one, they've got that amazing strategy.

They got all six of those.

Wow, look at that.

Wow, that's pretty fast. Look at that, look at that swooping mechanism. That works really well. They popped a wheelie.

They popped a wheelie, too.

See, that's an interesting strategy. You can see he's dropping all the balls down there. This is a really high scoring robot. You can see how much of just a wiring nightmare it begins to get. Uh-oh, uh-oh, we've got someone on the edge there.

He's about to jump, and of course, the crowd is yelling for it to jump.

Somehow, your robot gets that performance anxiety, a little stage fright up there.

We're at like two course 14, and of course 10 major, so we knew we had no chance. So we might as well go out in style, yeah!

We still have four robots in the final round.

So our main strategy is just get six balls, and trying to distract the other robots before it gets any points.

It looks like one of the balls might have dropped into the hole.

Final score, team 27, 28 points.

So we tried to do line following, and that just didn't work. So we went back to the simplest thing we could think of, and there it is. The loading up dog.

Hello, dog.

People bringing their friends. And they're off.

What kind of dog do you think that was meant to be?

Oh, interesting.

Team one wins, 12 to 4.

General Gao is a good name for two reasons. One, I like General Gao's chicken. And two, General Gao is a name which inspires fear and respect in our opponents.

And they're off.

All right, looks like dog just cleaned up. And we'll just wait for General Gao to do its thing. All right, there's two balls in one hole. But General Gao just dropped all of his balls right there.

Final score, team one 22 points, team 27, 14 points.

Three and a half weeks of work have come to culmination, and we now have a winter, team one. Sayonara.

See you next year.

See you next year.

Welcome to the 11th Annual 6.270 contest.

We are doing the live web broadcast.

Robots begin on either end of the table on these starting areas. From this point on, the robots are on their own, then they have 60 seconds to operate. There are 18 of these yellow balls laying on the table. These are worth two points to any robot that possesses them. There are balls in each of these robots. The object is to get those balls into the hole.

All right, and they're off. Team one, they've got that amazing strategy.

They got all six of those.

Wow, look at that.

Wow, that's pretty fast.

Look at that swooping mechanism. That works really well. They popped a wheelie.

They popped a wheelie, too. See, that's an interesting strategy. You can see he's dropping all the balls down there. This is a really high scoring robot.

You can see how much of just a wiring nightmare it begins to get.

Uh-oh, uh-oh, we've got someone on the edge there.

He's about to jump, and of course, the crowd is yelling for it to jump.

Somehow, your robot gets that performance anxiety, a little stage fright right there.

We're like two course 14, and of course 10 major, so we knew we had no chance. So we might as well go out in style, yeah!

We still have four robots in the final round.

So our main strategy is just get the six balls, and trying to distract the other robots before it gets any points.

Looks like like one of the balls might have dropped into a hole. Final score, team 27, 28 points.