I helped design and build our robot for IEEE SoutheastCon 2024. It posted the highest scoring run of 35 universities and won first place in the Hardware Design Competition.
Fully autonomous. The robot had to handle three kinds of object, small blocks, big blocks, and cylinders called thrusters, and cross a 7 inch wide, 2 inch descending gap, all inside a 12 x 12 x 12 inch envelope. Volume drove most of the mechanism decisions.
A 10 x 10 inch chassis, mostly VEX metal, holding four DC motors and the electronics. Everything else bolts to it, so it needed clean interfaces for the bridge, the thruster pickup, and the block manipulators while staying inside the envelope.
A 3D printed bridge and the mechanism that lays it. The placement device carries an embedded gear driven by a 360 degree servo through a pinion, and the bridge hangs on a keyhole slot, so a turn of the servo horn releases it.
A four bar linkage that stows inside the chassis and deploys out of the frame down onto the thrusters. Servo torque was the constraint, so the crank runs through a 3:1 reduction on an embedded 3D printed gear.
The holder on the end has three cylindrical cutouts, flared at the bottom to guide intake, each with a small servo and custom horn to clamp the thruster.
I did not design the original intake; I was handed it to fit inside the envelope. I added a mechanism that folds it into the chassis and remade the rubber band holders, which had been a common failure point.
Hardware Design Competition, IEEE SoutheastCon
2024Of 35 participating universities
2024