Our bot checked off about a week ago on the 7th of December! We are very proud of ourselves for what we have done to come this far. In the competition, we were one of the only two teams that were able to complete the challenge.
Here is a video of Trashbot at work:

 

 

We have just under 34 hours left before our professor and his assistants review our project for the "beer check off". If the bot works correctly, we will have completed this project a week ahead of time and receive a case of beer as a prize for the early check off. We all think this is possible since we are debugging the final parts of our state machine, and have been for the past four days. We don't expect to get much sleep tonight. Maybe we won't sleep at all. Either way we are prepared for the challenge ahead of us.
In honor of these final hours, here is the video of our inspiration for the project:

Getting the Crown

Printed and implementing the test harness

We decided to use MDF for our prototype and implement our sensors right away. This was worth it it because the price difference form Foamcore and MDF was not significant to our the remainder of our funds.
 An almost Isometric View of our bot

Top View of our bot

Front view of our bot (note the sensors)Underneath the front view of the bot

Solidworks Model

Progress 11/16/14

• got farther with the mechanical design with the help from visualization of the 3d model
• soldered the IR sensors on perfboard
• made templates for the sub state machine for future implementation
• started interfacing the IR sensor

tape sensor working on breadboard