MEAM 510: Design of Mechatronic Systems

During the fall of my sophomore year I took a Master's Mechatronics course.  This was the final project in the class.  We had about a month to design, build, wire, and program three robots that autonomously play hockey.  The puck is designed to emit IR light so that the robots can detect it with an array of phototransistors.  To locate themselves within the field, each bot is equip IR cameras from Wii Remotes.  A pattern of IR LED's located 5 meters above the rink can be picked up by the camera and utilizing some rotation and translation matrices, the robots can determine their orientation and position in the rink. 

On a team of four people, I was in charge of electrical design and prototyping, translating our code from MATLAB to C, as well as creating debugging tools for localization and motion code.  In translating to C, I developed libraries and custom header files to implement in our final code.  

Out of 26 teams, we came in 4th. 

Machining

For each robot, we machined a steel drive train, aluminum base plate, and bronze name plate to add weight, increasing down force, thus maximizing the power coming from our motors. Obviously our favorite part was the finish it added to our bots.  

Circuitry

Each bot had 2 - 2in x 3in perf boards stacked on each other.  The top one included an M2 microprocessor, a switch which determined which side of the field we were on, debugging LEDs, and the mWii camera, which detected the constellation.   The bottom one had 2 analog multiplexers, enabling us to rapidly cycle through the 16 phototransistors that detect the puck.