Components

The first idea was robot pong, but when we tried to build a prototype we found out that the contest would be mostly about hardware, which meant we would be excluding a lot of people.  So we canned that idea.

Idea #2 is the one we're going with.  Take a small R/C car, throw some sensors on it, and have it race autonomously.  This obviously isn't a new idea, so I decided to throw guns into the mix.  I think the idea of having two bots racing around a course shooting at each other, all autonomously of course, sounds really exciting :)

So I asked a friend who does embedded work what we should use to control it and he recommended the Arduino board.  I also searched around and found a cheap 1/18th scale R/C car, and the IR sensors we had used on another project seemed good.

So I think the prices were around this:

Car: $80, 1/18th scale, comes with assembled car, remote, batteries, charger

Controller: $35 arduino decimila

Sensors: 3 Sharp IR's, $8 each

The arduino can drive the servos directly, can be powered directly off the vehicle battery, and can read the sensors directly.  So just that one board will do everything we need.  The board we got has an on-board USB connector already, so you just plug in the cable and you can reprogram it right there.  It's really convenient.

Kallahar