ENPH 253: Robot Summer

Competition

This summer I got to take part in the annual Engineering Physics Robot Summer competition and it was arguably the most interesting, challenging and absolutely enjoyable thing I have ever had the pleasure of enduring. Every year the competition takes place there is a new theme and for us the scenario was a burning pet shelter: our robot had two minutes to rescue as many stuffed animal pets from the course, a hazard-filled building and bring them back to a safe zone.

Construction

I got to learn so much about the design process throughout this course, we started with really quick "shape" prototypes, where the main idea was to just get a feel for the robots general form, this is where rapidly being able to cutout shapes on the laser cutter came in handy. Afterwards the same laser cutting techniques were used to make our finished chassis and also extended to designing parts that could be made on the waterjet.

Electrical

The electrical system taught me a ridiculous amount about the nature of debugging, from parasitic capacitance to noise propagating through the ground planes on the pcb there were so many small things I picked up. Truly the realization that the lumped linear circuits model I was taught in my circuit analysis classes is just a model is a fun but painful lesson to take. For the robot I got experience working with KiCad aswell as using tools like my wavegen and oscillascope to debug. I also certainly inhaled a fair amount of solder fumes but hopefully it wont hurt my average too much in the coming semesters.

Code

We maintained a very object oriented approach when it came to software, I don't exactly have a picture to put here (looking at C++ is sometimes a tad boring.) But I can definitely say that the idea of trying to make code for all your componants into a black box is a wonderful ideology for a programmer to have and one I definitely got to implement over the course of this project.