BotBot
Autonomous competitive robot
R. Davis Born • Helena Scutt • James Harrison • Alex Kahn
Mar 2017
Overview
This autonomous robot had 3 primary functionalities: localizing & locomoting within an arena, identifying the frequency of magnetic “check-in” stations, and launching projectiles into various goals. It needed to perform in a competition which involved moving to one of three check-in stations, measuring the frequency at which its magnetic field pulsed, and reporting that frequency to the arena’s electronics, at which point one of three goals was made available to accept a projectile. Points were awarded for successful completion of these various tasks. Robots competed tournament-style.
Personal contributions
The team collectively designed and implemented the state machine in C which ran the entire project on a TIVA launchpad. I also designed and implemented the hardware & software of the localization & locomotion subsystems. To localize, a stepper motor swept infrared photodiodes across signals from beacons around the arena. I designed motor drive circuitry and the transresistive & filtering circuits to read & condition the photodiodes’ signals.
I wrote low-level software to run the motor drive in various modes, and I wrote software to drive the photodiode circuitry. I wrote higher-level services which found bearings to the beacons and implemented my algorithm for localization given these known (but uncertain) angles. I also helped implement drive-motor, encoder, and LED hardware & software. All circuit diagrams were prepared in Altium.
Results / deliverables
Fully automated, fully contained competitive robot
Bill of materials showing adherence to $200 budget
Software design documents (pseudocode)
State-machine design documents (state transition diagrams)