Lego Robotics

To get a better understanding of robotic design, I developed a series of "RoboRats" to explore the functionality of sensors, motors, actuators, gearing, and the Arduino board. Legos were used as the building blocks for ease of rapidly prototyping and familiarity. Overall, my robots performed very well in competitions based on speed, weight, and completion of the tasks like block collecting and line following.

Block Collecting Robot

Line Following Robot

Purpose:

To get a better understanding of robotic design, I designed robots to perform a series of tasks exploring the functionality of sensors, motors, actuators, gearing, and an Arduino board. Through the process, I demonstrated robotic motion techniques including proportional wall following, line following, and object interaction. These robots were put into competitions against other robots in the class and judged based on speed, weight, and completion of the tasks.

Design:

For the Line Following Robot, the most important feature was the IR sensor to recognize when the robot was veering away from the black path on the white board. A simple If-Else conditional statement was sufficient in maintaining the robot on the line.

The Block Collecting Robot is much more complicated, with an extendable arm subassembly and a basket deployment subassembly. A linkage system powered by servomotor was sufficient in extending an arm high enough to knock down hanging blocks. The basket is held in place by another servomotor, and is only triggered when the front switch is activated.

Implementation:

For the Line Following Robot, I didn't initially consider how heavy the battery unit was causing the robot to tilt up from being backloaded. Because of this, I redesigned the frame to house the battery unit in the center of the robot to get better weight distribution.

The Block Collecting Robot had issues with both subassemblies. The Legos of the linkage system were initially not strong enough to support the force of deployment, so extra bricks were added as reinforcement. Further, the blocks kept initially bouncing out of the basket, so extra netting was added to catch blocks that tried bouncing out.

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