IEEE SoutheastCon Hardware Competiton
The "IEEE Southeast Convention" is an annual convention that is held in various regions within the Southeastern United States. This year the convention was held in Orlando, FL and featured a hardware competition. The purpose of this competition was to test an engineering team's ability to design, fabricate, and deploy a customized robot to complete goals outlined by the competition committee.
Project 2022-2023
Competition's Rules
For that year's competition, the robot was supposed to replicate feeding and moving animals after a hurricane. Each team had to perform given tasks in a three-minute time limit and be judged on performance against other university’s team submissions.
Per the rules of the competition:
•Robot must be completely autonomous during competition
•Robot must fit in 1 foot cube prior to competition start
•Robot should start upon red LED light flash
•Robot should complete as many tasks as possible within three-minute time limit
•Robot must have own internal power supply
•Robot must have an emergency cut off switch
•Robot should have ability to move specific objects to specific identified locations on the play area
Figure 1: Mock-up of play area the robot is designed around
Proposed Design
We 3D printed a robotic arm from the KAUDA opensource arm and we are using two Atmel Atmega 2560 microcontrollers, one to control the robotic arm and another to control the chassis. Our chassis had four Mecanum wheels to allow for omnidirectional movement throughout the course. We are using two Pixy cameras that allows for a stereoscopic view of our playing field and identifies objects.
Outcome
During the competition, we decided to disregard the robotic arm as it was negatively impacting our competition performance, and we instead pivoted to pushing objects to the desired locations. Because of this, we created new aspects to assist in pushing such as a plow on the front and back of the robot. Throughout our testing phases we were able to achieve some, but not all aspects of the competition. During competition, we adjusted our robot design to account for some components not performing as expected to maximize our performance. Overall, we placed 11th out of 30 competitors, we were the best placed team in Florida, and we were the first team to complete 3 objectives on the playing field.
Team 2022/2023
Poster
