Day 2

Our team met again this evening for about 2 1/2 hours. We tossed around a lot of ideas about handling the moon rocks. At the end of our meeting we still hadn't determined if we want to pick up the rocks or herd them back to the re-fueling station for the payload specialist.

We talked about a few different chassis ideas, and I think we made a final decision, however I'm not going to go into details yet. This years challenge requires us to use wheels which have an extremely low coefficient of friction on a surface that is similar, however the playing surface has a very small pebble texture. This makes it even more difficult, as even less surface area from the wheels will actually be in contact with the floor.

As was the situation last year, we are again facing the same issues of everyone on the team wanting to design the "ultimate" robot; the robot that can do everything in the game. Trying to do this results in a very complex mechanical design as well as some very complicated software to accomplish some of the automated functionality. I prefer simple and elegant.