My robot

[cruiseroutfit]

As some of you know, I am a Mechanical Engineering student at the U. As part of my classes, we are building a small robot to compete against other robots. It is required to walk (not roll, no tracks, etc) and it has to meet a series of specifications (weight, size, etc). On top of that, it is 100% automatic, meaning as a soon as we press the start button on the robot, it must seek the other robot using its own built in functions... Pretty geeky eh?

Here is a pic of our robot thusfar:

 

[RockMonkey]

Cool. Can ya use weapons?

 

[cruiseroutfit]

Cool. Can ya use weapons?

We can (and will) incorporate a defense mechanism next semester, but it can not be destructive. The goal is to flip the opponent or push them out of the "ring" that we are competing in. There are ~25 teams, and the winning team is exempt from the final test in the class...

I still have to do alot of soldering to add the battery pack, the handyboard, the H-bridge, IR & sonar sensors...

 

[cruiseroutfit]

BTW, those motors are 400:1 planetary drive's.. She's got some gear reduction

 

[RockMonkey]

The goal is to either knock it off it's feet, or push it out of the ring, eh? There must be a weight limit, then? What other restrictions? How are you making it "sense" the other bot?

 

[cruiseroutfit]

The goal is to either knock it off it's feet, or push it out of the ring, eh? There must be a weight limit, then? What other restrictions? How are you making it "sense" the other bot?

Yup, there is a wight limit, as well as a size limit (~8"x8")

It will have infared sensors on the front of the robot, this will allow the robot to locate the center of the ring (light place above the center of ring). Thus, both robots "should" head to the center of the ring to engage eachother, from there, sonar sensor will allow us to determine the distance and location of the opposition, our robot will turn so that it is pointing directly at them and then proceed to engage. The robot will also have an IR sensor on the rear that will allow it to determine its distance from the center of the ring... thus keeping it inbounds. Complicated yet?

The handyboard that we program is capable of 4 seperate motor controls (but more than one motor can be one each control)... Each motor is variable so speed and manuevering is highly controllable. The H-bridge (similar to a relay) will allow us to power the motors with a 9.6V RC battery pack while using the handyboards 0-3V motor output.



I am a nerd...

 

[MattL]

thinking of putting lil rubber feets on the bottom of the legs to help give it traction?

 

[MattL]

and out of curiousity... do you have a bucket of parts.. or do you have to design this from ground up.. if so who does the cutting out of the parts.. who does like the cad work to make sure it fits...

This is really cool.. looks like a lot of thought goes in to it.

 

[cruiseroutfit]

thinking of putting lil rubber feets on the bottom of the legs to help give it traction?

Yup, we are deciding on options.. we may add rubber, or me may knurl the bottom of the feet. Testing will determin which one is most efficient.

 

[cruiseroutfit]

and out of curiousity... do you have a bucket of parts.. or do you have to design this from ground up.. if so who does the cutting out of the parts.. who does like the cad work to make sure it fits...

We have anything that we can think of... The only regulation regarding parts is the motors (must be pre-approved) and the Handyboard (everyone must use the same computer) Other than that, it is all up to us.

We did all the cad design in Solid Works based on preliminary drawings that we came up with. From there, we machine all our own parts using the U of U's and SLCC's machine shop. The legs CNC'd @ SLCC, and all the other parts were hand machined at the U (both schools have full machine shops at our disposal)

We have a budget to spend on parts, we can spend our own money and the school writes us a reimbursment check, or the U has a stockroom of material that we can buy at face value. There are 100's of specialty shops to but all the misc parts from (pulley's, belts, etc).

Each of the 20+ teams have completely different dirve mechanisms and overall designs, ours is very simple and efficient. I will post some more pics of the various robots as I get them...

 

[cruiseroutfit]

Here is the winner from several years ago (take note that this is the finished model, we are yet to add our "defense mechanisms" to the robot.

 

[cruiseroutfit]

Here are a few other robots from years past...

 

[onetuff76]

should have made a half bowl with a suction device to keep it down and some sort of prong to flip others

 

[crimsonride]

That's pretty awesome Kurt. Makes me want to hurry up and get to the U. We made a robot to climb stairs but it wasn't up to scale with those. We made it out of old cabinets and superduty accesory belts. Keep us posted.

 

[Shawn]

Purty kool........

I guess you will be building a new Rock Walker soon.......eh???