This robot project was a senior design project for students of Computer Science & Engineering (CSE) in the Spring 2003 semester. Our 4 memebers are all seniors graduating with Bachelors of Science in Computer Engineering. The group members are:

• Michael Simitoski
• T.J. Cleary
• Jeremy Cerullo
• Justin Teems

We needed groups of 4, we all knew each other and just decided to work together. It turned out to be a great team. Several group names were considered and while none were official, we ended up calling ourselves 'The Dirty Dozen' as we were group number 12. And, of course, the robot is sponsored by BassClefff.com.

Design a robot that can traverse a game board, knocking over black dominoes while avoiding red dominoes. That's about it! Well, not exactly. The robot starts at 'home base' and must knock over dominoes in quadrants 2 (lower right), 3 (lower left) and 4 (upper left). The 2 red dominoes will be placed in quadrant 4 at runtime. Each team knows the permanent location of the first 2 black dominoes. The second 2 black dominoes are placed at runtime.

Each team has 2 minutes to give the robot the coordinates of these remaining 2 black dominoes. When completed, the red dominoes are placed and the robot begins, having 5 minutes to complete its task.

Each team gets the microcontroller (worth abuot $160) and a further budget of $200 (we can spend up to $400, but our grade suffers).

Anyway, those are the basic rules. In addition:

• The robot must be fully autonomous (no user input after the programming of the second 2 domino locations, runs off of battery, etc., and no connection to a computer other than the supplied microcontroller).
• The robot must use the supplied HC6812 microcontroller from Technological Arts.
• The robot must fit within the 9" wide X 9" long X 12" high size limits.

We went through a bunch of ideas, but I'll give you the theory that we finally agreed upon. By the time the robot starts moving, it (the bot) can and will know the locations of all the dominoes that it is supposed to knock over. So, we decided that designing a system that can visually (or by any other means) discriminate between black and red dominoes would be too much for the project. While designing such a system would be fun, we were under time and monitary constraints.

So what was our idea? Well, we decided to design the robot in such a way that when it travels the game board, it moves over dominoes by default. Using a door, it could only lower the door when it reached the coordinate it knew had a black domino. We would have 2 wheels in dead center of the bot and 4 ball casters on the corners for a total of 6 points of contact with the board.

The only flaw in our plan was that we needed a line tracker to keep track of where we were on the board and to keep us on a line (don't want to be drifting all over the place knocking over whatever, especially with our plan). The tracker needs to be close to the bot and as it turns out, the tracker must be in the center of the bot because that's where the line is. Problem? Well, the dominoes are also on the line.

So what we ended up doing is the following: The line tracker is on the door which is lowered all the time. The bot moves towards the dominoes it knows about with the door down. We used a simple break beam from RadioShack which knows when something gets in the bot's path. It checks to see if it knows a domino is supposed to be there. If it doesn't know of one, it must be a red domino. The door rasies, the bot moves over the domino (relying on timing) and the door lowers.

Of course, the minor details of getting to this point were 99% of the project, but the picture pages are a pretty good representation of many of those. Check out the gallery!

http://www.centredaily.com/mld/centredaily/5768963.htm