2006 brought us another game developed by the San Antonio hub folks. It was colorful and ahead of its time with the concept of “household robotics”. It brought the game into our own back yards where mom would hang out the laundry to dry. Yes….the on clothes line. Why put mom through that burden when robots can take over the task for her!

The objective: Design and build a robot to retrieve “dry” laundry from clotheslines and place “wet” laundry on clotheslines within the allotted time (3 minutes).

The field consists of the central gazebo structure that is surrounded by four backyards each containing four clotheslines of varying height. Along the outer border there are four back porches that are isolated from the yard areas with doors that swing out into the yard and close automatically.

At the start of the match robots are positioned on each back porch. The spotter is responsible for loading up to 12 pieces of the wet laundry (red, blue, green or yellow colored bandanas) onto the robot. All loading must be completed prior to the machine entering the yard area through the saloon-style back doors. Because mom likes to hang her laundry all in one trip. Switches on the back doors determine the order in which teams entered the yard area and are used as a tie-breaker. Once the machine enters the yard, it cannot return to the porch and cannot receive any more wet laundry.

Once in the yard, teams can score points by removing dry laundry (black, black paisley and red paisley bandanas) from clotheslines and placing it in their basket and by placing their wet laundry on the clotheslines. The position of the wet laundry at the end of the match is used to determine the point value of the laundry; so, pieces that fall from the line prior to the end of the match do not score. Multiple pieces of wet laundry in contact with each other only count as a single piece; there must be some separation between the wet laundry pieces (cuz that’s how mom would do it!). Contact between wet and dry laundry only matters in the basket, and only at the end of the match. At that time, any dry laundry in contact with wet laundry does not score (because you got it wet!).

Moving Forward

Now society has progressed to using Automatic Dryers instead of the Classic Clothesline.