Team Foosketball

The Mission

The object is to design and build a device which, in collaboration with a teammate's device, wins a series of contests. In each contest, your device will strive to combine speed, strength, finesse, guile, strategy, etc., to complement and assist your teammate's device in out-performing the opposing team's devices.

The basic contest is for your team's devices to deliver ping-pong balls into a goal at the opposite end of the "arena" from your team's starting position. The "contest arena" is a flat rectangular table 1.22 m (4 ft) wide and 2.44 m (8 ft) long. The table is surrounded by a clear plexiglass border extending 0.55 m (22 in) above the table top. A raised bar divides the table into two sides. The bar is 5.1 cm (2.0 in) in diameter and is mounted 5.72 cm (2.25 in) above the surface of the table. The bar is supported at the table edges. Three views of the arena are shown in Figures 1 through 3 on Pages 10 and 11. At each end of the table there is a plexiglass goal box with two scorable regions divided by a sloping plexiglass wall. The top of the sloping wall is 15.24 cm (6 in) above the surface of the table. The width of the opening is 101 cm (40 in). Each team's devices begin the contest on one (assigned) side of the arena, within a set of painted start-lines. At the start of the contest, 15 ping-pong balls will sit on top of the center bar. The ping-pong balls will be evenly spaced with 6.35 cm (2.5 in) between their centers. At the start, and during the contest, the balls will not be constrained on the table top in any way.

The score at the end of the contest is based on the number of ping-pong balls in each of the regions of the goals. Ping-pong balls in the front region of the goal are worth one (1) point. Pingpong balls in the back region (over the sloping wall) of the goal are worth three (3) points. The team with the highest score at the end of 35 seconds wins.