The vacation part of summer is over and now let’s program some more robots! Our first robot did great at the competition in April, but now that we’ve gotten our feet wet, it’s time to dive into the more complicated aspects of robotics programming.
One of the main challenges we had was trying to figure out how to search the island room for the candle. We tried many different algorithms to search for the candle, but could never quite get into that room. What if, instead of us trying to determine the best search algorithm, we let the robot find the solution? By using AI, we hope to program a robot which can find the best candle search solution and get us into the island room.
To do this, we are first going to build a virtual replicate of the arena and robot in a robotics simulator. 
As of right now, we are using The Simbad 3D Robot Simulator. Because Simbad was created for machine learning research and is simply designed, we believe we can get to the AI programming aspect of the project quickly. However, because it is very simple and the physics are not very life like, we may find we need another simulator sometime in the future when our program gets more complicated. The picture shows the world I created with a replicate of the arena, a sample robot, and a light representing the candle.