Name: Scavenger
Description: Circle the Enemies and FIRE!
Movement: Moves in a slight angle relative to a traget robot's position
Tracking: Track closely with gun and adjust heading to match target
Fire: Fire on stationary targets
I named my robot Scavenger because of the way it wins. It will move in a circular path around enemies waiting for them to expend their energy by dodging fire. The original design was to only fire after the enemies have become disabled. This worked for the most part, but winning is about scoring points and you are able to accumulate a huge amount of points, although less than surviving, by scoring hits. This also allows Scavenger to take down stationary robots that have yet to be disabled such as SittingDuck, and Fire.
One of the things I learned while fine tuning this robot was that each situation requires a slightly different approach. To win we must try to make our strategy as general as possible and then fine tune.
We were able to discuss with our classmates strategies against eight of the sample robots. In each strategies, I realized that although each strategy may work on one of these robots, it would never work on another. You can tell by the labels written on the strategies when it is labeled as, e.g. "WallsCounter", "SpinBotcounter", etc.
Even after coming up with a strategy myself, I found that, although I could beat one robot with it, I would lose or come very close to losing against a different robot. I knew my strategy was solid, but I understood that I had to do test runs to understand problems.
Erratic Movement Robots:
The only two Sample Robots that I was unable to defeat with over 50% success rate was the two AdvancedRobots. SpinBot and Crazy both extend AdvanceRobot allowing them to, along with other things, do simultaneous movement. Since my robot is based off the movement of the target, the erratic movements from the SpinBot and Crazy to lower the effectiveness of my evasive movement. I believe if I can devise a better strategy for wall collisions and tracking, I would be able to fine tune my robot to defeat even these advanced robots.
Problems
The Walls:
No, not the Walls robot that seems to take everything down, but the walls of the arena itself hindered my movement. Allowing the robot to turn to correct it self wasted valuable time and allowed others to get more hits on it. I finally opted to just back track a few steps. Since the robot's movement is based on the movement on the target, it will auto correct itself after backing away from a wall. Otherwise, on stationary targets it will provide evasive movement until they have moved or run out of energy.
Enemy Range:
The last problem I found was trying to get my circling movement based on my target and their range correct. I had noticed that with by turn radius 120 degrees I was easily able to beat sample Walls, but the large turn radius allowed Sample Tracker to get an upper hand. If I lowered the turn radius to 100 degrees, I would be able to quickly move around Tracker, but then the small turns was less effective against Wall's fire. After hundreds of test runs, I decided that it would be best to just make a minor compensation rather than adjusting my strategy. I opted to change the turn radius relative to the distance of the target. This fix allowed me to compensate for both near and far targets.
No comments:
Post a Comment