ME72 Tank Wars
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Today was the ME72 robot contest at Caltech. I’ve been going to see these things for over 20 years, and it’s always entertaining. The theme this year was “Tank Wars”. Each team had to build three tanks, and the tanks had to fight for control of three bases on the playing field. Each base had two buttons on it, and to take control of a base, one team’s machine had to push the button corresponding to the color of that team. One base was on the ground in the middle of the playing field. One of on a see-saw, and the third one was on top of a platform with ramps leading up to it from both sides. The ground base was worth one point for each second of control. The see-saw was worth 1.375, and the platform base was worth 1.75 points per second. As a result, most of the time, machines from both teams would go up to the platform, and a lot of times they ended up just alternating control of it for the duration of the match. So the point advantage of the platform wasn’t that much of a factor in most matches.
One funny thing was that they had a fire extinguisher handy by the playing field. This was because of the incident two years ago when one of the machines caught fire in the middle of a match.
The first match was won by the Riveters team. They had a clever strategy. In each match, they had one machine go and take control of the see-saw base. Then the machine would drive to the center of the see-saw and balance there, so no other team’s machine could even get on the see-saw. This worked well for them, and in the end, the Riveters were the only undefeated team of the day. And that included the final. Very well-done. They deserve both ears and the tail.
