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Members

  • Jonathan Hurst(President)
  • Peter Sand
  • Brian ? (the firebot guy)
  • Tom Lauwers
  • Brian Kirby
  • Dan Vogel
  • Fay Shaw
  • Aaron Solochek
  • Kwanjee Ng
  • Charlie Reverte

Projects

  • Jim 2 (Jonathan Hurst, Peter Sand, Brian Kirby, Aaron Solochek, Kwanjee Ng)
  • Firebot(Brian ?...)
  • Helicopter(Dan Vogel...)
  • Overkill for MoboJoust (Johnathan, Brian K)

Awards/etc

Excellence in Autonomy and Overall Award of Excellence special awards.

Other Information/Notes

From Jonathan:

Brian and I built Overkill for the MoboJoust copetition. I think it's still in the club. The competition arena was a table about the size of a ping-pong table, with walls, that Ben Brown built. There were small collapsing barriers at the start lines at each end of the table. They dropped at the same time, and both robots headed for each other, and the first robot to cross it's opponent's starting line first wins the round. There's a 10lb weight limit. To build our robot, we rummaged around in the RoboClub bins 'o' components and found a giant torque motor that weighed 7 pounds. We added a battery that was around a pound, and then added wheels and a timing belt. We put the motor at the front of the size limit and the wheels at the back, and still, the torque would cause the whole thing to wheelie. We totally won the competition, all the other robots bounced off of our battering ram like golf balls. It was sweet.

We also went to the SAE Walking Machine Decathlon with Jim2, well-tested and functioning. Peter Sand even had a vision system to auto-detect the traffic cone and go touch it, which was one of the events. We rented a van, and since people had classes and finals and everything, plus some last-minute tweaks, we had to drive 24 hours straight to get to Colorado State in Ft. Collins, Colorado, which is coincidentally my hometown. We stayed at my house, although not much; we spent most of the time at the competition arena, testing the robot, creating the scripts, and fixing problems. Because Jim2 planted its frame with each step, the dead-reckoning was amazingly precise; and we used it to navigate everywhere. We just spent the evenings hand-controlling the robot through the course, which was super-slow, and then pressed "play" during the competition to repeat the motions. Classic robotics, like industrial painting machines.

We had one bug where, for some unknown reason, the rotation sensor would jump, and the robot would think it was way for from its goal, and would rotate fast into the hard stops. We theorized that a cable had broken, so we took apart the robot over the course of one night and reassembled everything with flexible stranded cable rather than solid-core cable (I'll never make that mistake again). The first time we turned it on, just to spite us, it did the sensor-jump thing again, but we were out of time. And since then, we never saw the sensor jump again. I don't know what the problem was.

The entire competition went great. We were incredibly nervous, but fortunately, that doesn't matter, because the robot will do what it will do. We won by a lot, because we spent five times as much time designing and building our robot as anyone else did.