ROBOCON 2016

About the Competition

The Asia-Pacific Robot Contest, ABU_Robocon, is an Asian Oceanian College robot competition wherin robots compete to complete a task within a set period of time. The theme of the competition is different every year. For the year 2016 the theme was “Clean Energy Recharging the World”. The concept behind the theme was the utilization of renewable energy sources.A video explaining the theme more elaborately is here.
The theme of the competition is made available to the contestant teams at the start of September and the competition is normally held in the first week of March.

Task

The task required was to build two robots, one named the Hybrid bot and the other the Eco Bot. The Hybrid bot was to be manufactured with semi-autonomous properties to be able to line follow, climb poles and also propel the Eco Bot. On the other hand the eco bot was to be an autonomous bot that was to be propellled by the hybrid bot. Any sort of elctrical power within the eco bot could only be used to actuation purpose to swivel/turn it.

My Design

The Hybrid Bot

The bot consisted of two hexagonal frames each manufactured from aluminium pipes with a holonomic omni wheeled drive. The hexagonal design helped reduce metal consumption as well as the stress per pipe. The frames were connected with three pneumatics to facilitate a reciprocating motion. Each frame further had three smaller pneumatics attached with grippers. These grippers along with the other pneumatics attaching the frames would complete the task of climbing a pole. The design aimed at openeing one side of the hexagonal frame and bringing the pole within the center of the bot and then gripping the pole from the top and bottom. The bot would then alternately losen one grip, extend , tighten the other grip and then contract until the top has been reached. The design to open one face of the bot to let the pole in, constituted a 4 bar mechanism with a pneumatic, whose design can be found here. The reason to use a pneumatic in the 4 bar than a motor lies in the high impulsive force required to shut the face close. A motor giving out the same torque as the pneuamtic would have ended up being much more costly. A blower was attached to the top frame of the bot to propel the eco bot.

The design of the hybrid bot can be found here.

The Eco Bot

The design of this bot was much simpler than the hybrid bot. It consisted of a 3 wheeled synchronous drive along with a sail attached at its top to capture the wind blown by the hybrid bot’s blower to propell itself. Also it had IR sensor attached at its front end to follow a line while being propelled.