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In this class, we were also expected to be able to build a robot. To the naked eye, this little RC-like car may not appear to be much, but it is in fact a fire fighting robot that is capable of searching up to 4 rooms on a pre-determined course. This robot, started its humble life as an ordinary VEX SquareBot. After careful consideration, we realized that the robot has room for improvement. We tore apart the SquareBot and reconfigured the encoder and motor's location, making it more compact than ever. The two main support brackets have been moved upwards,shortening the length, as well as the width of the body by almost 2 inches all around. Having a compact robot is very important in this competition, because that means less chance of bumping/scraping into walls and higher chance of entering a room unscathed. From the picture above, you can see that the robot has been built upwards, while providing plenty of room for the Arduino board, batteries, voltage regulator and a full size bread board.  The newly built robot, in which we named it Better Than Snuffy, or BTS, is then outfitted with sonars, line sensors, encoders and flame sensors to help the robot sense the arena. There are plenty of ways of putting out a fire, but we went with the good 'ol fan method as it's able to provide a consistent result throughout the tests. Initially, we considered using vinegar and baking soda to produce carbon dioxide to starve out the flame, but even with a fan duct to concentrate the gas, experiments showed no improvement over the simple fan-only design. We retired  the fan from a dusty pc power supply and upped the voltage to give it more oomph. Once the robot finds the flame/candle, it'll extinguish the candle with its fan.The robot itself works surprisingly well, when the code doesn't send the robot crashing into walls that is. Ashuai and I have spent countless hours working on this robot, but both the hardware and the software gave us the red lights. As pro as it may look, BTS can only enter the first room at a rather high success rate, when compared to the other three rooms.