ECE's 2008 Spring Robotics Competition
Team 3 (left-to-right) Michael Wright, Melissa L'Amoreaux,Robert Reyes and Jacob Dascomb
The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering hosted a robotics competition for its students as part of their Spring 2008 Senior Design projects. We caught up with Dr. Harvey and asked him to tell us about the competition and why it was chosen for this year's ECE Senior Design class.
The robotics competition was based on the 2008 IEEE SoutheastCon hardware competition. The local competition had the two-fold purpose of selecting a team to compete at SoutheastCon and to evaluate the performance of each team's robot as part of their grade in senior design.
Robotics has become a popular choice for senior design project because of the multidisciplinary nature of robotics design. Designing a robot requires electrical, computer and mechanical engineering aspects, and brings together a lot of what the student's have learned into a significant capstone design challenge. The competition adds excitement to the process and creates an atmosphere where the design teams want to excel in order to compete with their classmates.
The name of the hardware competition was "Return to the Moon." The basic goal for the competition was to design a robot within a certain design size to locate valuable minerals on the moon. To simulate the variable lunar surface the competition field consisted of smooth, sandy and rocky areas for the robots to traverse. The minerals were simulated with 2-inch wooden block cubes. Different colors and RFID tags distinguished the value or types of minerals. The goal for the robots was to retrieve four mineral samples of maximum value within a 6-minute time frame, and return them to the designated home base. The competition included individual and head-to-head rounds.
The challenges the students encountered in the process were typical of challenges encountered in any engineering design. The non-technical challenges they faced included time management, working together as a team, setting and meeting deadlines, and budgeting. Technical challenges they faced included understanding product specifications, properly integrating subsystems, good construction techniques, designing and conducting proper testing, and handling unexpected problems. A majority of the students had little design experience beyond the typical classroom or educational laboratory project. This was the first time they were required to design, build, integrate and test a system of this complexity.
A survey was given asking the students what advice they would give to future senior design students preparing to start a similar project. Here are the questions and some sample responses.
What is the most important piece of advice you would give to a student starting senior design?
- Start as soon as possible. Murphy's law is bound to happen.
- Begin to construct the device before the 1st semester, don't wait for second semester. Also, try your device on the practice landscape/area as much as possible. We had unforeseen problems too late in the game because we didn't do enough testing on the landscape itself. Objects on the landscape ended up having more an effect than we thought, on the sensors specifically.
- For every part of the project, make sure your design is made with the whole project in mind. That is, balance functionality with ease of programming and physical integration.
What advice do you have concerning Overall or System Design?
- Test, Test, Test! Integrating is the most difficult, so set aside enough time for all the integration.
- Due to the short amount of time, I will recommend a system design that meets the main specifications. It is usually a bad idea to try to impress the committee by having a complicated design because the team ends up wasting time testing the complicated design.
- Go simple. The simpler the better. Why use four wheels when two will do?
- If you know IR sensors work, why even attempt to use ultrasonics?
- Keep things simple - more complicated is not always better.
Any other advice you have not covered [in the areas] above?
- Have fun, but at the same time remember that this class is preparing you for real life situations.
- Start early, and expect things to break or go wrong. Have a backup power source, servers, sensors, because eventually they will fail. If possible use metal gear servos, in the long run you'll definitely save money.
- No matter how bizarre an idea is do not dismiss it lightly, even if the idea is not implemented it could lead to a better design idea before the project is completed.
- Make sure everybody is doing an equal amount of work. Don't let one person carry the team. Give your programmer plenty of time to work. If you are done with your area, help others with their areas. Try to help each other out as much as possible because it really does help.
- Work together.
Most of the comments I get from students concerning the use of the robotics competition for senior design projects is very positive. They like the competition aspects, and many find robots to be very fascinating. My favorite question I get from the students during the senior design courses is something like "How come we don't learn about this kind design and integration in the EE/CpE curriculum?" My usual response is "What do you think you are doing now?"
