Block-Gathering Robot
Mechatronics
Dr. Hadas Kress-Gazit
Team of 3
August 2022 - December 2022
Skills:
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Embedded Systems
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Circuit Design
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Analog Sensors
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Arduino IDE/C++ programming
Overview
The Cube Craze competition was a competition sponsored by ASML, where each team was given materials and a budget of $40 to build a robot that competed in a block gathering competition. Each robot starts on a different color and would attempt to collect as many cubes to its starting color in the Cube Craze competition. Whichever robot collected the most cubes by the end of the time period would win the round. We also competed against the ASML robot and actually won (though it was mostly because their robot glitched and put all their blocks on our side).
Project
With a team of 3, we built our robot with two collector arms which were lowered by a drawbridge system. It would first attempt to collect blocks from the middle, then move around essentially like a Windows screensaver on the opposite color. We figured that as long as we collected some blocks, our robot just bouncing around on the other side would allow for it to either a) collect blocks back to us or b) knock blocks off of their side. Unfortunately, on the night before competition day, our QTI sensor, which was used for black edge detection, broke. Thus, we quickly wrote some open-loop control while it was on the opposite color. The interesting part of this project was learning about registers on microcontrollers, as we were not allowed to use any Arduino built-in functions like pinMode(), digitalWrite(), etc. Thus, controlling the H-bridges, servos, and motors, were not as simple as using some Arduino libraries.
