Tri-State Warriors' Team Schedule

Please go to goo.gl/ExQy to view our team's schedule from now until the competition!

Welcome to the ME250 Tri-State Warriors' Blog

Hello, and thank you for visiting our team blog. Please visit us at least once a week so that you can follow our progress through our weekly postings. Our team is excited about having the opportunity to compete with other students in the Slotbots II competition during the Fall 2010 Semester at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor.  Our team has done a lot of planning and brainstorming as we have tried to develop a strategy and concept that will ultimately lead to victory in the tournament.

Our strategy is focused around playing on the table-top. Our team chose to go in this direction because by doing so we can essentially gather more mass on one-half of the table than an opposing team can obtain by playing the slot.  Furthermore, a Pugh Chart analysis with two other strategies verified that playing on the table-top was found to be our best option.  And so the challenge of choosing a concept began

For the concept we tried to model our ideas after real world applications that are used to perform task similar to what we need to do in the arena; a few examples of such are the Hungry Hungry Hippo Game, golf ball collectors at the driving range, etc. and the following are what we decided to use.  Our team designed a car that captures balls on top of the table and pushes them to the funnel.  Our machine has a door that drops to trap balls in the machine housing.  Using a door allows us to get balls on edges without the risk of them falling over the edge of the arena.  Also our car moves with treads instead of wheels so that we can effectively turn on the field and overcome obstacles. 

For your convenience we have uploaded three photos of our preliminary machine concept.  The first two pictures show the up and down positions of our door, and the last is an exploded view of our assembly. Please feel free to leave us comments or suggestions.

Thanks,

Tri-State Warriors