Week 5: Building the robot and the Tip the Can competition

Overview of the day:

In the lecture Ted briefly went through the plan for the day and the room the competition would be taking place. We then had to assemble our robot and buy wheels for it last minute. We then competed in the competition.

Lab work:

We started off the lab with Adam showing the various wooden bases he cut out to me and Cillian. Our design for the tip the can competition was simple, but we agreed that for the Robosumo tournament we would laser cut our chassis.
Unfortunately Adam couldn’t find any suitable wheels in the model shop for the motors. This meant that we were in a big rush to find wheels so we could compete that day. Adam went to a Eurogiant shop and found a toy tractor that had wheels which fit the axles on the motors.
While he was doing that, Cillian and I worked on putting together the robot. We used the wooden piece as a platform which we attached everything onto. We taped the battery pack on top of the wooden platform, and blutacked the breadboard on top of that. We had the motors mounted underneath the wooden piece, held on surprisingly well with blu tack and electrical tape for added strength.
The wheels were rubbing against the platform so we cut out two notches out in the wood so the wheels weren’t restricted. We then mounted the switch in place with more blu tack, at the front of the robot. We later found out that the switch sometimes wouldn’t press, so we taped on a long cardboard piece that would give the switch a larger surface area where it could click.
At the front of our robot, I had the idea of using Cillian’s USB-key lid to act as like a dragging 3rd wheel that would keep the robot level and had a low friction surface that meant the robot tracked straight. This worked out well, and although our robot didn’t look the most technologically advanced, it posted a pretty fast time!

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When we assembled the robot we went into room 36 to post our first time. We realised that the robot didn’t have enough traction on the surface used for the competition, so Ted recommended that we use a bit of bicycle inner tube wrapped around the wheels to give them more traction.
This worked out brilliantly and we posted a time of 6.24 seconds. This meant that we were in 4th place, which we were very happy with.

Unfortunately Adam’s phone which had the video of our robot competing broke, so we have no footage of it.

We decided that we wouldn’t be able to get a quicker time, so we started discussing our ideas for the Robosumo competition instead.

What I learned:

I learned how to work with others when building things, and how to better organise my time and allocate time slots for certain things. For example, we should’ve bought the wheels on another day and not have left it till the last minute.

The challenges my team faced:

We were in quite a rush to build the robot and go looking for suitable wheels for it, which was our fault for leaving it till the last minute. In future we will be better at making sure to get things done in a timely manner.

Our tasks for next week:

We must now start the design of our Robosumo robot. We are probably going to make it out of laser-cut panels, as our robot isn’t currently sturdy enough to battle another robot.