There comes a time in every mini-sumo match when you know it’s over. Your robot has went head-to-head with their robot, and your robot is slowly slipping backwards. Right about this time, you’ll get a sinking feeling in your stomach. This is because you know that — in no more than a second — your mini-sumo is going to lose increasingly more traction and eventually lose the match.

The problem is that your mini-sumo does not know this. It is happily spinning its wheels, thinking it is moving forward, and probably anticipating victory in a more or less robotic way.

It would be nice if you could give your mini-sumo a sensor that lets it know where it is going. Then, either programmatically or discretely, you could add some logic that enables the mini-sumo to back out of a bad situation. A good method for accomplishing this is to hack a mouse, as seen in the Seeing-Eye-Mouse project. Can’t wait to try this on one of my Sumovores.