Trilobot
Trilobot
2015
For the final project of the Mechatronics course, my team built and designed this first-place robot from the ground up. Given constraints on size, budget, microcontroller (PIC24), and energy storage methods, our bot was to compete in a game of shooting ping pong balls. The game which was played in a specific arena consisted of four periods - first a 10 second orientation period (a reference IR LED was lit), followed by three 30 second periods in which balls could be collected at the dispenser and then shot at the active goal which was indicated by another IR LED.
Our strategy for the competition was to design a robot that would be consistent and robust. To acheive this we determined that, with our timeframe, simplicity was key and that to compensate for our "low-risk, low-reward" design we would make it as fast as possible. In the end, this strategy paid off and the consistency of our robot led to our beating some much "smarter" and complex robots. My team won the competition with a score of 25! The second place team had a score of 19, and the other three teams had a combined score of 9.
Some of the hardware components that were key to our design were:
-
the motors; we splurged a little bit to get motors that would give us the speed we needed.
-
the flicker; since we were all members of the compliant mechanisms research group, we designed a shooter that employed a compliant member which was deflected and released to flick the balls. This design was extremely consistent compared to the other groups' DC motor shooters.
-
hopper agitator; after having many problems with balls jamming in the hopper, we decided to take advantage of the motion already being produced by the shooting servo and, with legos, improvised a mechanism to knock the balls around a bit.
While I played a role in the mechanical and electrical systems of the bot, my biggest contribution was the software. Almost single-handedly, I programmed our robot using the C programming language.