Egg Hunt

This Saturday, I'll be participating in the Fall 2003 Lego Robot Egg Hunt at the Great Lakes Science Center as part of the Autonomous Robotics class I'm taking. It's free and open to the public, so if you're in the Cleveland area, then come on out. The competition starts at 12:30pm.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the Egg Hunt, two teams of two robots each are placed in a large enclosed arena, with plastic eggs scattered throughout the arena. At each end of the of arena is a nest. At the back of each nest is a bright light. One nest has a horizontally polarized light, and the other has a vertically polarized light, so that the nests can be distinguished by the robots. Any pastel eggs deposited in your team's nest are worth +1 point, while black eggs are worth -4 points. Rounds last 10 minutes, and the goal is to score more points than the other team. There are many strategies, but the most common one (and the one employed by my group's robot) is to collect a single egg, check its color, and drop it off in the appropriate nest.