Competition Robot

Design:

The design for this robot's movement is stemmed from a math error that I made while attempting another design. At first I hoped the have the robot move to the top middle, then move down in a 45 degrees, turn around go back up and then go down the other side at a 45 degree angle, repeating this movement pattern until the end of the match. However due to a math error, I found that I could make the robot's movement erratic, so I decided to keep this design. The downside is that the robot will sometimes follow it's previous path, thus making it susceptible to being hit from shots that were fired behind it.

The shooting design of this robot is meant to hit moving targets. It seems that this robot is most accurate while making turns, however it does have an ability to hit targets on the run due to a change in turret's position. When up close with the enemy, this robot will fire, move back, turn and fire again then continue moving around the battlefield.

My robot named BlackMagic can be found here.

Victory:

This robot can effectively beat the following sample robots: Corners, Fire, SittingDuck, Crazy, SpinBot and Tracker. This is due to the fact that many of these are stationary, or the fact that the movement pattern of my robot is able to evade most of the shots fired and it was able to return fire with a high rate of success.

Defeat:

My robot is unable to reliably beat the following robots: Walls and RamFire. It seems that walls moves too fast for my distance shots to be effective and also the when my robot repeats it's movements it literally runs into bullets fired by walls. As for RamFire, my robot does not have an effective way to get out of being cornered by RamFire. If the battle is kept in the middle of the field my robot usually can win. However when the battle moves to the sides it usually gets trapped and RamFire is able to take advantage of that and finish off my robot.

Lessons Learned:

After analyzing the battles, I realized that I need a more effective strategy to deal with robots that corner or force my robot to the edges, where they can do huge amounts of damage. Also I learned that an inconsistent movement really works in evading fire from the enemy, however retracing the route that the robot just executed could have disastrous results as it may run into bullets that were previously fired by an enemy robot.