chess bot the decisive moment.

Today our group learnt an interesting lesson. The extra difficulty of making the robot autonomous and capable at making its own way across a course, we had set it up to be astute at dealing with our impractical original protocol, when it came to the final test our method of navigation became instantly flawed. our primary mode of navigation relied on the ultrasonic sensor to sense when it was going to collide within the next movement (which we set a 100cm aka 1 metre). which works very well when you have a empty hallway not so much when you have a circle of 40 people surrounding the robot our poor little Trolley was going around in a clockwise motion which was different than his usual anticlockwise general motion.
we didn't manage to get far but traveled a decent amount of distance.

In general the least complicated units managed to get the end. and in the final three only one had a sensor which was the touch sensor.

Zak wrote his own version of the commands which came out the same but ALOT tidier. I replaced his turn in the 3rd part of the protocol with the revised turning on the spot command, and it was free to run.

overall what did we learn
. often the conditions you prepare in will be different than in presentation
. simple almost always works
. there is no medals for second to last place (there is no medals at all)
. If we stuck a bayonet on the end no-one would stand in the way but we might have had a difficult job removing it from the wall (maybe this on we didn't learn, yet....)

zak, seamus, thomas and I have almost become experts at overcomplicating through impracticality and then creating and then improving solutions. which is indefinatly better than taking the easy way.