ECED 3901 Robotics Competition (3rd Year)
The ECED 3901 Peter Gregson Design Competition. An autonomous robotics design competition ran each year to evaluate ECED 3901 Electrical Engineering students. My team consisted of Owen Stuttard, Mark McCoy, and me. I did the hardware, Owen wrote the firmware, and Mark wrote most of the software. We all worked on everything though.
The course is simple in concept, an autonomous robot must identify where mock landmines are, defuse them by flashing LEDs near them, and collect them. Then the robot must move them to the defusal area. There are six mines on the course as well as moving wildlife. Depending on what you complete, determines the score. See the scoring below.
The Course
Our run:
The Design
Our design was ambitious; our goal was to create a robot that could defuse, collect, and transport all mines on the course before travelling to the Mine disposal area. Every other design pushed the mines to the Disposal area one at a time.
The video above explains it all, but when the robot approaches a mine, it is defused by the LEDs flashing at 4000Hz. After the mine is positioned within the robot’s arms, the time of flight sensor should get triggered. This triggers the arms move up to the top of the robot and rotate back, depositing them into the robot’s basket.
The robot localizes using a 360-degree Lidar and wheel encoders. The raspberry pi does minimal processing, and instead, it was left up to a computer remotely connected to the pi running a Ubuntu virtual machine.
