This robot was built as a group project for ECSE 211: Design Principles and Methods during my second semester at McGill University. The robot had to perform a variety of tasks that resembled a simplified game of soccer. It was built using the Lego Mindstorm it, with the Lejos library which allows for Java code to be uploaded to the computer.
The main tasks that the robot had to perform were:
- Localization
- Navigation
- Obstacle avoidance
- Ball pickup and ball launching
The robot had to be capable of doing these actions fully autonomously. The only human input would be to start the program on competition day. The robot would then connect to wifi to receive data such as if it was playing offence or defence, and where the area to pickup the balls was. The robot's awareness of its environment came mainly from its ultrasonic sensors, which were measure distances to walls and detect obstacles. The robot also had light sensors, which were used to detect gridlines on the surface of the game area and help the robot keep track of its position. Our group chose to use two computer bricks in our design, having one acting as the master and the other as a slave, in order for us to take advantage of additional ports for motors and sensors. This made our robot quite large compared to other designs that only used one brick, which prompted us to call it The Behemoth.
Throughout the six week period we had to build this robot, we had to fully document the design process. This included notes and diagrams from the intial brainstorming of the design, CAD models of the design, a Gantt chart showing how our time and resources were distributed, and documentation of the software including flowcharts, UML diagrams and Javadocs.
At the end of the semester, there is competition day. All the robots compete against each other and are scored by the professors. We had roughly 20 robots the year I took the class, and since each robot had to do 4 seperate runs, this really took all day. Fortunatly, whileother people are demonstrating their robots, you get to present with your group the poster you made detailing your robot and the design process that it went through.