THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY
What Went Well
The parts of this project that went well well was the process of 3-D printing parts and the coding process. We avoided the issues other groups had with "warped" pieces by adding on extra supports to our 3-D prints. The coding process also went fairly smoothly, as we had experience coding for Arduino robots before. Also, the utilization of the Otto library provided by the person who made the 3-D parts for the Otto bot helped greatly as well.
What Went Poorly
The parts of this project that went poorly was during the assembly of the robot; specifically with attaching the motors to the body parts. It took us a week until we realized that we could attach the motors to the servo holders via screw through the motor hole. We also had to "align" the motors, so that during the walking process, the legs and feet wouldn't spin in the wrong directions. We also had trouble with balancing the weight from the combat arm attached to the side of the robot. We also could've done a better job on managing the wires for the robot, however we made sure that we used the minimal amount of wiring.
How We Made Improvements
We made a number of improvements to the base model given to us. We attached an entire attack-arm, that the robot can use to not only maneuver itself, but also knock down opponents. There is an omni-directional wheel attached to the bottom of the arm, as to not only keep it parallel to the ground, but also to give support to the robot's main body. We added our own ultrasonic code, and used it in conjunction with the Otto library to make the program the robot runs on.
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Throughout development, we tested various other ideas. We tried to add a 2nd arm on several occasions. Sometimes, the 2nd arm would even have a wheel attached to it. other times, it was just a popsicle stick. We tried other ideas as well, such as constructing bigger feet using popsicle sticks to enlarge the foot's base.