Project Overview
Introduction to Instrument Design (ENPH 253) is a course taken by second-year engineering physics students. Its goal is to train students in the practical aspects of intelligent instrument design and construction, including electrical and mechanical design, prototyping, microcontrollers, sensors, actuators, motion control, and control theory.
To offset the intensity and difficulty of the course, the engineering content to be tackled by the students has been framed in the context of an autonomous robot competition. Each year students spend six weeks in a series of labs and lectures to learn some basic elements of electromechanical design, and then form teams of four to embark on seven weeks of full-time robot design and construction. Time commitment during this phase is at the students’ discretion but often reaches 50 – 70 hrs/week. The course culminates in a publicly attended robot competition that also serves as the final exam.
To offset the intensity and difficulty of the course, the engineering content to be tackled by the students has been framed in the context of an autonomous robot competition. Each year students spend six weeks in a series of labs and lectures to learn some basic elements of electromechanical design, and then form teams of four to embark on seven weeks of full-time robot design and construction. Time commitment during this phase is at the students’ discretion but often reaches 50 – 70 hrs/week. The course culminates in a publicly attended robot competition that also serves as the final exam.
The Competition & Robot
Side Profile of Robot
This year's (2012) competition involved a race to stack blocks. Each team's robot was to navigate a 8' by 4' course from the starting/building area to the block depot, where it picks up a block, and back again to deposit and stack the blocks. Points are awarded 1 pt. each for the bottom two blocks in a stack and 4 pt. each for every block after the first two. Teams faced off 1 vs. 1 in heats and the winner of each heat was the team to first get ten points worth of blocks in their depot (ten unstacked, or four stacked) (shown to the left is a picture of our robot).
The team consisted of the following members:
Chris Masternak
Afshin Haidari
Evan Lawrence
A video of the robot in operation can be found here.
The team consisted of the following members:
Chris Masternak
Afshin Haidari
Evan Lawrence
A video of the robot in operation can be found here.
The Robot on the Playing Surface
Front Profile of the Robot & Design
Front Profile of Robot
The robot we built for the competition had many components, all of which had to be designed and constructed by the team. It consisted of three subsystems, mechanical, electrical and software which worked together to meet the design goals for the project. Design goals included simplicity, ease of modification, and general functionality (the ability to drive, pick up a block, and hold/release it at different heights). For the design, we tried to balance simplicity with versatility. For example, the block gripping mechanism was a simple claw that could not extend out from the robot; but it had a small arm mounted on top that could sweep out-of-reach blocks into the claw. This small "collector" arm, along with the flexibility of the claw material enabled the robot to pick up blocks from many orientations. Another example of simple and versatile design was our decision to use microswitches to control various aspects of the robot, allowing for detection of things such as contact with the block depot wall, and presence of a block in the gripper-claw.