So every year, Northwestern’s engineering school, McCormick, holds a robot competition called Design Competition. Usually, it involves some made up game that requires robots to compete against each other to see who is better at said made up game. Anyway, some of my friends and I decided to join, just for fun, and to see if we could actually make a robot. We weren’t doing much (besides playing IM for the Rainmakers) so we thought it was a good idea. The competition this year was called Counter Strike (like the game, which sucked because when I wore the shirt around, people thought I was a mega gamer or something). It was a form of robot soccer, where you had to get these metal inch wide ball bearings and then shoot them into your opponent’s goals. The two robots were divided by a barrier, so we couldn’t just duke it out BattleBots style.
So the competition is usually announced in December, and the actual event is in May. The first few months were pretty crazy though. I actually couldn’t get an LED to light up in a breadboard for like an hour. It sucked. Programming was also a pain. I knew C, but writing C for a PIC was pretty annoying because we didn’t know how to reference pins, or what functions actually worked. Plus, you couldn’t just printf to see what was going on inside the code.
A few months, and several chassis later, our robot began to form. Sometime April, our robot learned to shoot balls, it was pretty sweet. We used a rotating arm with a few magnets attached to the end. The magnets would pick up the ball, and then bring the ball back up to this PVC pipe. The pipe’s entrance had a pretty large lip, so the ball would get caught on the lip, and roll into the pipe. There was a small gate that held the ball in place. Our robot aimed with a little laser on the front, and then would just open the gate to shoot. Go go gadget YouTube video:
We ended up doing alright. We got seeded 4th in the time trials (out of 15). There was a glimmer of false hope when we upset the third best robot in overtime. However, in the next round, our robot failed catastrophically, and for some reason, instead of shooting the ball, just spun in a circle. It was pretty sad, since that round was essentially for third place. Afterward, we received a consolation prize for “Best Ball Shooting.” Overall, it was a good experience, filled with random troubleshooting (once, an IC holder didn’t make proper connections, and I wasted four hours of my life), a solder iron burn (which turned out really nice and silvery), and the feeling that I actually made my first real robot.
